Jeanette Barres Zug: A Life in Service to Moravian Bethlehem

Jeanette Barres Zug: A Life in Service to Moravian Bethlehem

Before there were professional staff, formal docent programs, or a Moravian Museum housed in the Gemeinhaus, there was Jeanette Barres Zug. This exhibition traces the life of the volunteer who helped shape how generations of visitors first encountered Moravian Bethlehem.

Born in Lancaster County in 1907, Jeanette grew up in Bethlehem and attended Moravian Preparatory School, where her fluency in German and French was strong enough that teachers pulled her from class to interpret for visiting dignitaries. She continued her studies at Wellesley, spent a formative summer in Munich, and returned home to teach languages at Moravian Prep. In 1929, she married Charles Zug Jr. at Central Moravian Church.

Her vocation with the Museum began with a single request. In the 1930s Miriam Taylor asked Jeanette to organize tour guides for a Rotary Club convention. What was meant to be a one-time favor became decades of work. She trained generations of tour guides, served twelve years as Board President, helped lead the Moravian Museum’s 1966 move from the Sisters’ House to the Gemeinhaus, organized the 1752 Apothecary, and contributed chapters to Bethlehem, the First Hundred Years.

Through photographs, archival materials, family loans, and personal effects, the exhibition tells the larger story of Bethlehem’s mid-twentieth-century historical interpretation through one woman’s trajectory and reflects on the largely unpaid work of women who built the public-facing Moravian Museum visitors know today.

This exhibition is funded in part by the Jeanette Barres Zug Endowment.