Adelaide Fries

Who was Adelaide Fries?

Adelaide Lisetta Fries was the foremost scholar of the history and genealogy of the Moravians in the southern United States. She made important contributions to the field as archivist, translator, author and editor.

Fries was born in Salem, North Carolina, the elder of two daughters of John William Fries and Agnes Sophia Fries. She never married, and lived with her parents in Winston-Salem until their deaths.

In 1911, the Provincial Elders' Conference of the Moravian Church in America, Southern Province, appointed Fries as archivist of the Southern Province, and granted her the use of a warehouse in Salem as repository and offices. She immediately began collecting, organizing, translating and publishing records, a work that continued until her death. Fries was never satisfied that the warehouse was a safe repository, and over the years her friends and supporters raised enough money to convert the former office of the Vorsteher of the Salem community into a fireproof repository. The archives moved into the new building in 1942.

One of Fries' best-known books is The Road To Salem, an account of the life of Anna Catharina Ernst. Written in the first person, the book is based on Ernst's autobiography and on the diaries and records kept by leaders of the Moravian Church in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Another well-known book, The Moravians in Georgia, has entered the public domain and is available online. Forsyth County was revised and updated in 1949, and a further revision and update was issued in 1976 under the oversight of J. Edwin Hendricks of Wake Forest University.