The history of Friedland Moravian Church began in the 1740s and ’50s when a number of German Moravians came to the New World and settled in Broadbay in what is now Maine. The New England climate was too harsh for many of them, and they decided to search for a more hospitable location to settle. It so happened that their pastor was George Soelle, a Moravian minister, and he knew that his church had recently bought Wachovia, consisting of 100,000 acres of land in central North Carolina. So the families set sail, and enduring shipwreck, seasickness, and fever, they arrived in Wachovia in two waves in November 1769 and autumn 1770.

Once here, the Broadbayers found a calmer climate, and a place of their own after the Moravian Church set aside about 2,000 acres of land for them, and each family took up 200 acres, with 30 acres in the middle reserved for the church.

The settlement was organized into a society of the Moravian Church on July 21, 1771, and Friedland Moravian Church (pronounced FREEDLAND) was formally organized as a congregation on September 3, 1780.