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A limited number of prints of “Grace Court Memory,” an engraving by Walter Stone commissioned by Eric to celebrate the West End neighborhood landmark in Winston-Salem, NC, are again available online for purchase. You can view a framed copy of the engraving print on the walls of the nearby West End Cafe. Prints are $25 plus shipping and sales tax. You can order your copy today from this Square marketing site.

From the press release by publisher Brill (Leyden, The Netherlands): American Moravians and their Neighbors, 1772-1822, edited by Ulrike Wiethaus and Grant McAllister, offers an interdisciplinary examination of Moravian Americanization in the Early Republic. With an eye toward the communities that surrounded Moravian settlements in the Southeast, the contributors examine cultural, social, religious, and artistic practices of exchange and imposition framed by emergent political structures that encased social privilege and marginalization.
Through their multidisciplinary approach, the authors convincingly argue that Moravians encouraged assimilation, converged with core values and political forces of the Early Republic, but also contributed uniquely Moravian innovations. Residual, newly dominant, and increasingly subjugated discourses among Moravians, other European settlers, Indigenous nations and free and enslaved communities of color established the foundations of a new Moravian American identity.

Contributors include: Craig D. Atwood, David Bergstone, David Blum, Stewart Carter, Martha B. Hartley, Geoffrey R. Hughes, Winelle Kirton-Roberts, Grant P. McAllister, Thomas J. McCullough, Paul Peucker, Charles D. Rodenbough, John Ruddiman, Jon F. Sensbach, Larry E. Tise, Riddick Weber, and Ulrike Wiethaus.

In the Acknowledgements section of the book, Wake Forest University Professors Wiethaus and McAllister kindly note the role Eric played in the organizing and hosting of the September 2020 conference that gathered together these scholars and topics. “Lastly, we thank our co-convener, former archivist Eric Elliott, whose vision and knowledge throughout every phase of this project provided steadfast foundational support. Without his devotion to Moravian history and maintaining a vibrant interplay among the Moravian Archives, Southern Province, the general public, the Moravian Southern Province, and our research community, our undertaking would have been near impossible. Every detail of this project speaks of his contribution.”

In May 2022 Eric wrote a guest editorial for the Winston-Salem Journal, asking for the honoring of the foundational enslaved members of the congregation with a marker near the spot of the group’s first meetings. His comments were in response to the placement of a marker about the church’s founding which mentioned only an enslaver’s home and not the known congregants. His arguments were based on what was documented by the Moravian Church as the foundational meetings of the group for at least the first forty years of its existence. Old Salem’s Director of Moravian Research Martha Hartley countered with an editorial saying the date mentioned in the marker has become the accepted date recognized by the church, while acknowledging the need for a marker at the site of the church’s first meeting place. Part of the reason Eric wrote the piece was to get the Church and community to acknowledge that ambivalence about telling its involvement with slavery might have affected how it remembered the church’s origin celebrations, and that important faith stories were being lost in the process.

In April 2021 Eric’s article, “Genealogical Resources at the Moravian Archives, Winston-Salem, NC,” appeared as the opening piece in volume 47 of the North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal, a part of their series on religious and denominational records.

To get in touch with Eric, contact him through his LinkedIn page or the form below.