Boehler, Peter

Related Category: Protestant Christianity: Biographies

(bö´lər), 1712–75, missionary and bishop of the Moravian Church, b. Germany. He went (1738) to Savannah, Ga., to minister to the Moravians. In 1740 he migrated with a group to Pennsylvania and there founded Nazareth and Bethlehem. He went to England and organized a new company of emigrants, the “Sea Congregation,” which settled in Bethlehem in 1742. He was superintendent (1747–53) of the Moravian Church in England and was made a bishop in 1748. Boehler returned to America and directed the founding of new Moravian settlements from 1753 to 1764.