The Tuscarawas Valley — Utopian Zoar, Moravian Missions & the Warther Carvings

Three days in the Tuscarawas Valley northeast of Columbus, a quiet corridor of the Ohio frontier layered with some of the most remarkable communal and missionary history in America. Day one steps into Zoar Village, the German Separatist commune that shared everything in common from 1817 to 1898, its brick houses and geometric garden preserved as a living museum. Day two moves to Schoenbrunn, the reconstructed 1772 Moravian mission that was the first Christian settlement in Ohio, and to the Dennison Depot, a Union rail canteen that fed a million troops in World War II. Day three closes at Gnadenhutten, site of the somber 1782 massacre of peaceful Christian Delaware, and at the astonishing Warther carvings in Dover, where a self-taught cutler rendered the history of the steam locomotive in ivory and ebony. Utopian dreamers, frontier missionaries, and a folk-art genius, all along one river.