§13 Epilogue

Very little remains in Bethel today to indicate that anything of any real significance ever happened here. The Native American village of Shekomeko, the Moravian Mission, the churches and the Quaker Meeting House, the schools, the post office, the blacksmith shop, and the railroad, are all no more, but the cemeteries left behind and the Moravian monument stand as quiet testimony that this was once a thriving little community of some importance.

For current residents of Bethel, the scenic rural vistas and picturesque tree-lined country lane offer a tranquil escape from the hurried pace of the cities where some of them live during the week or commute to work. Lovely horse farms and a fish and game preserve have replaced the dairy and cattle industries which dominated Bethel during the first half of this century Polo matches are played on land where cattle once grazed. Much of the old farm land has been divided up into small lots and sold off along with the houses once used as tenant homes for farm hands and their families. A community well still used by most of the inhabitants here is a quaint reminder of those days.

Thus, Bethel has entered a mundane existence as a neighborhood pretty much like thousands of others across rural America. The residents here are proud of the history of their hamlet, however, and anxious to see that its surviving landmarks and rural character are preserved. Perhaps one day, to this end, Bethel will be designated an historic landmark.

In the meantime, the past will continue to live on in Bethel, because people will not let it be forgotten what happened here. There is something particularly fascinating about this story that begs to be told time and again. We think about the Mahicans of Shekomeko, struggling to survive in a world they no longer understood, and of the doomed Moravian Mission, and of men of supreme faith such as Christian Henry Rauch and Gottlob Buettner. We admire the noble figures in this drama, such as John Rowe and Richard Sackett, and are troubled by the less-noble, such as John Sackett. We marvel at the tenacity of the early families who came here with little more than a vision of a new life in a new land and who managed to put down roots and survive.

In a time many of us have difficulty understanding, we are nostalgic for the sanity and serenity of rural nineteenth-century America, for the age of steam locomotives and one-room school houses, for small, close-knit communities like Bethel where the people lived and worked and worshipped together, an age when America was growing by leaps and bounds and that was something to be proud of. These picturesque scenes and many others live on in our hearts, even as the physical evidence of their existence crumbles to dust.

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