[piano intro] - A group of women and girls are making the journey from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to honor the founders of Salem Academy and College, The founders walked hundreds of miles to establish a new life that would empower women to lead through education.

- They're recreating the journey 19 Moravians made in 1766, walking 500 miles to their alma mater and tracking though five of them are walking 500 miles in the footsteps of the first teachers at Salem Academy and College in Winston-Salem back in 1766.

- Okay, let's do this.

- So my name is Frances Cronlund.

I'm Salem College class of '98 and I'm walking 500 miles to celebrate Salem Academy and College's 250th anniversary.

- I didn't just hear about it.

I've been one of those kind of behind the scenes wanting to do it since about five or six years ago when we all knew the 250th was coming up.

- I was just only going to do six days at the start and six days at the finish.

And I'm walking each day and I'm thinking, wow, I really need to be a part of this.

I wanted to be part of the history of it.

I think people are gonna look back and remember this.

- My role is the logistics coordinator and I thought that this was something that I could maybe contribute to because I like to travel and I've done some hiking and I thought, oh, I'm gonna put those two things together and create this route that's really easy when it's only like three days.

But this is 29 days.

So this has been quite a challenge, but it's been really fun.

- Holt saw some of my posts and commented that, oh, Salem was doing a 250 year anniversary walk.

Loving to hike and loving Salem, it was the right thing to do.

So I signed up for every leg.

- I called the committee and said, has anybody thought about a support vehicle for the trip?

And they said, oh yeah, we really want.

And I said, well, here I am.

I'm your driver.

I'll drive the entire route.

They said, "You really will?"

And I said, yes.

- I'm most excited about meeting my future best friends 'cause I know my relationships from Salem have been super important to me forever.

So I don't know the ladies yet, but I have a feeling that when this is over, we'll be lifelong friends.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] - Well, one of the things that really drew me to become the president of Salem Academy and College is this momentous time in its history.

And to have an opportunity to join the institution during its 250th birthday celebration was just icing on the cake.

- I was asked to lead the 250th anniversary celebration about two years ago as part of our strategic initiatives.

It's one of our biggest initiatives.

And as we started planning it, I had a steering committee working with me and we determined that one of the most critical things to do was to tap into that story, the history that is so fundamental to who we are.

- Salem Academy and College was founded in 1772 by the Moravians.

The Moravians were a German-speaking sect in Europe.

They originally came to America to do missionary work.

They eventually decided to establish permanent settlements.

Bethlehem was founded in 1741 and became a thriving community.

The Moravians were looking to expand, but land prices had gone up so much in Pennsylvania they needed to look elsewhere.

Luckily, Lord Grandville, the royal governor of North Carolina, offered the Moravians an opportunity to buy land there.

They ended up purchasing a hundred thousand acres in North Carolina in what is now Forsyth County.

They named it Wachovia.

Shortly after they bought the land, they sent a group of men to North Carolina to the Wachovia tract to establish a settlement.

That settlement was called Bethabara, which means House of Passage.

They knew that Bethabara was going to be a temporary community because the ultimate goal was to build the town of Salem.

In 1766, our group of single sisters and older girls arrived at Bethabara, but they did not end up moving to Salem until 1772, the same year that they founded what would become Salem Academy and College.

- The Moravians felt that girls deserved as rigorous an education as boys, an equal education really.

This was revolutionary at the time.

There were probably among the few that did that, but there was always that equal emphasis on education.

- I had heard about it when I was a student at the academy and I remember sitting when I was listening to that story as a kid thinking, I've got to do that someday.

I cannot imagine what that would be like to walk from Pennsylvania to North Carolina.

- Everything about it was interesting to me.

The fact that it happened before the country was a country, the fact that it was a group of young women in this hostile environment and that they did it and that they persevered.

- I knew that they were this group of women and girls and I guess two men, but 18 women and girls who walked from Bethlehem to Winston-Salem.

And so when we started thinking about the 250th anniversary, probably five or six years ago, there were a group of us that said, wouldn't it be cool if we actually could do that walk and walk here?

And so I've been thinking about, it's kind of been bubbling up in the back of my mind that whole time.

- So we started talking about could we do this?

And we had a few other instances to build on.

We had the Dudley Shearburn walk that happened in 1981.

She had done the journey and then Dina Bass and classmates in the class of '95 had ridden their bikes.

And then we had Erica Barnett who had done it in early 2000.

- The summer of 2001, I was organizing many DV tapes for the communication department.

One of those tapes was an interview of Dr. Dudley Shearburn by Salem 2001 graduate Nancy Pritchard.

On the tape, Dr. Shearburn talked about recreating the single sister's walk in 1981.

- One rainy Saturday morning, I was sitting up in bed drinking a cup of tea and reading the book "Less Time for Meddling", which is the history of the academy and the college.

In essence, it said that October 31st, 1766, four women and 12 older girls arrived at Bethabara today.

I mean, I read it, it was just a little entry and I thought that is just not possible that 12 little girls and four women could walk from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1766 by themselves.

And I didn't even know Frances Griffin then, who had written the book.

And I looked her name up in the phone book that minute and I called her and I said, "I'm reading this book and I wanna know if this is true."

And she said it is absolutely true.

- I was very inspired by her retelling of her journey and decided to recreate the walk for my senior thesis project.

As I began to plot the route, I spoke with Dr. Shearburn and got my hands on Aaron Fogleman's translation of Salome Meurer's journal.

Salome was one of the original single sisters from 1766.

I took the translated journal plus a new map to the Moravian archives where I sat down with archivist Mr. Richard Starbuck and began to plot the route using old maps and points of reference from the journal.

As the route began to emerge, I realized that it was different from what had been traveled by Dr. Shearburn in 1981 and biked by Salem College students in 1994.

On October 2nd, 2001, 230 years to the day after the single sisters set forth on their journey, I set forth on mine from Bethlehem to Bethabara.

- Three of my Salem sisters and I biked from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Winston-Salem.

The the campus supported us.

We made t-shirts and sold t-shirts to kind of fund the trip, which was completely off the wall unusual.

Nobody thought it made any sense outside of Salem, but you know, because of what that journey means to our campus, it made perfect sense to us.

And so we figured it out.

I think the difference between that experience and being on this journey team is that we have women who are really digging into who those original women were and what motivated them.

Virginia Hart's history blog is just an amazing resource and what we've learned from Martha Manning and Virginia Hart and Jim Manning, Martha's husband, just digging in and really working with Salem and Moravian archivists to unearth the history and tell the story.

I read Salome's journal for the first time on this committee.

I did not read it when I didn't even know that it existed, to be honest when I did the bike trip.

- This was in 2016 and I was in Salem at the Visitor Center attending a lecture by Paul Peucker, who's a archivist from Bethlehem Moravian Archives.

He mentioned that this group of of women and girls walked down from Bethlehem to Bethabara.

And I just went, oh my gosh, that's part of the history of Salem Academy and College.

So I went up to him afterwards and talked to him and showed him an interest and he eventually led me to Salome's Journal.

- Whenever Moravians went out on an official journey, they kept a diary to report back home what they had encountered, but also to record what God was doing through them.

This is the diary that was kept of the travel of the group from Bethlehem to Salem and it is in a collection of travel journals that we have here at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem.

And a couple of years ago, Aaron Fogleman, historian, who was particularly interested in migration from Europe to North America, looked at these diaries and came across this one and this one piqued his particular interest.

He translated the text into English and published it in a journal.

So now it's accessible in English.

It's a very detailed account of this group traveling from Bethlehem and their progress each day and the people they encountered, sometimes people were yelling at them.

Women just traveling by themselves with only a few men around, caused some some sensation.

- I just think that it is impossible for us in this, you know, multiple cell phone, easy access to communications, easy access to bathrooms, to really appreciate what they actually went through heading into the wilderness 500 miles away.

That is the DNA that we want to have.

- What they accomplished and the vision and the courage that it took for them to complete it, I think are really again, fundamental to the Salem story and to what it means to be a Salem woman and a Salem student or Salem graduate.

- So for 250 years we've been the beneficiary of Salome and her cohorts who bravely left their homes and their families in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to come to North Carolina to the wilderness.

The girls school has survived to this day as Salem Academy and College.

So we are grateful to them and this whole journey was really a celebration of their sacrifice, their foresight.

- I mean it's really phenomenal to me how it came from an idea and a promise to something that actually came to fruition.

And there were a lot of people that really pulled together to make it happen.

But it was at the beginning, it was just an idea and it was just something that inspired us.

- What stories they will have to tell after this 29 days has passed.

We would not be able to do this if it were not for Salem sisters just owning it, being enthusiastic about it, going into places that are uncomfortable for them, like social media, you know, we're gonna rely on them to do some social media posts, but really what we want from them and what we're excited for them is that they will be able to just enjoy this journey and tell the story when it's over.

- I'm especially going to be thinking about Dudley Shearburn who was a professor at Salem College and a great mentor and a great friend who passed away recently, sorry Clem, so I'll dedicate this walk to her.

- The driver came over, bought us a Coca-Cola.

People were just so wonderful, they really were.

- It was just such an honor to have an opportunity to go to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a place I had never been before.

And to see the incredible similarities between what we have here in Winston-Sale m and that incredible place where the Moravians first established in Pennsylvania.

And so for me to have an opportunity to join and walk with those women as they embarked upon that journey and to think about what an incredibly historic and momentous occasion that was, was really something special.

- We worked with the Central Moravian Church in Bethlehem and I worked specifically with the pastor of that church and she is a college alumni, which is just amazing.

She planned the most wonderful worship service that we all attended.

- We are honored to be part of Salem Academy and College's 250th anniversary celebrations, particularly in remembering the 18 women and two men who came out of the Moravian community here in Bethlehem and they traveled to North Carolina to build up a new Moravian community there.

Several of them helped to start and nurture the little girl school in Salem.

We're gonna go to God's acre and we're gonna find the grave of the one walker, Rosa, who came back to Bethlehem and was buried here in God's acre.

And we're gonna find her stone and we're gonna put some flowers on her stone to remember and honor her.

[melancholy music] - The next day we actually left from the single sister's house, which we know is where the walk started 255 years ago and had a trombone choir.

So we tried to closely resemble what Salome and the 1766 travelers would've done.

[upbeat music] - And the thought that we are able to recreate this journey probably very closely actually to what they really did.

I mean minus the horses and the wagons and the ferries and all those things.

But at least the places I think makes me at least feel much more close to what we are doing and to the land and to the place and to her.

- [indistinct] crossing and we're not on a ferry.

- As we walk today on this first day.

So yeah, I think for me it meant a lot to think we were actually going to experience.

Heaven knows ours is different.

I mean we're staying in hotels, you know, if we get too tired we get in the car.

But to some degree you can sense that spirit.

- I started with a basic route that the historic team had put together and following Salome Meurer's journal.

And then I tried to match that up with like, are there actually places to sleep along the way because we want a roof over our head, we don't wanna sleep out in the bush or in barns.

[lilting music] And then we proceeded to figuring out the exact route and we used a lot of mapping to figure out how we were gonna walk.

And you know, then there are just lots of details you have to figure out.

Like, well what, wait, it's not that simple.

And are there bathrooms along the way?

This is gonna be perfect.

We're gonna get to the church at one o'clock.

That is when they're opening up for us to use their bathrooms.

- Apparently they chose this route for the availability event.

- Real bathrooms that flush.

- And it's hard to find a bathroom.

It was hard to find a bathroom, you know, sometimes you had to jump in the woods.

- I like to think back to the journal that Salome wrote and the challenges that they faced and we're gonna face a lot of challenges, not exactly the same ones, it will be unique to us, but we'll face them and we'll conquer them just like they did.

And we have a group of really smart, amazing women and I'm just looking forward to that.

- We're on this little sketchy road.

There's not a lot of side areas to walk and we come across this, we are in this together is this amazing group.

What do y'all think?

[group chatter] - It's a gorgeous day.

- And we are in this together.

- We are in this together.

We already feel it.

- I thought it would be fascinating to go along the original route and it won't look like the original route, but it will at least show us some of the hardships and stuff that they went through.

- And day three of our hike, we are passing from Redding to Lititz today.

And one of the things I was excited about seeing is things that they actually saw along the route.

And we are at Ephrata Cloister.

Anyway, it's a beautiful spot.

So we wanted to document that.

- I have to say I'm not very historical, you know, I was looking more at how many miles are we gonna hike?

You know, we're gonna stop, you know, the logistics.

But it was when we started first, when we had in Bethlehem, they had a church service and then we walked into Lititz, Pennsylvania into this other Moravian town.

[church choir singing] So all of that made me see the history in these ladies who walked before us.

I didn't read the diaries at time, but I'm so aware of it now and I think about that while I walk.

- Okay, we've made it to the Susquehanna River.

This is the part of the journey I was personally looking forward to the most out of the entire journey 'cause it was the hardest day for the original journey in 1766.

And I say it was the hardest because it was referenced several times in the journal and that they recalled it, that they, if they made it through this, they could make it through anything and this was their hardest day.

- Francie talked about the journal as a spiritual guide for her own personal journey.

And so I think there is that that that Salome every day or most days reflected on sometimes the trials that they went through.

But she didn't spend much time on that.

More importantly, she talked about gratitude and thankfulness for what they were able to accomplish and for their safe passage.

So I think the journal in that way is a guide.

- I think it's vitally important that folks here, Salome was 16 years old.

The person who actually wrote the journal we were reading was 16.

- And I just thought it was remarkable.

I mean she was the age of an academy student today and I thought it was difficult to write every day, kind of my thoughts.

And she did that on behalf of the whole group.

She was the appointed journalist for it.

- Well I think your daughter was extremely lucky.

For those who don't know, she's an academy student and every day Frances wrote her daughter a letter.

- So gave me something, a sense of purpose and maybe some control or structure over every day where I really kind of didn't know what was gonna happen.

And also maybe gave her something to look forward to, some inspiration.

Also just reflect myself on what am I learning from this experience.

[group singing] [group singing continues] [group singing continues] [group singing continues] - October 10th at five o'clock we had our morning blessing.

I'm sure we all did that in five.

At midday a man came and said, where are you going with this herd of sheep.

Answered to Carolina.

Several others came and wanted to talk all kinds of nonsense with us.

But we said we didn't understand English.

We had our new.

[melancholy music] - We're gonna start the route today at Montpelier, which is James Madison's home and beautiful grounds.

- That is where the Constitution was written.

So making sure when you go to the house to see that.

- We had walkers from different groups.

Most of our walkers were alums, but it wasn't restricted to just alums.

You could invite family, friends, brothers, sisters.

And it wasn't just women either.

We did have some brave men who got out there and walked with us.

We had faculty and staff from both Salem Academy and College.

They were very involved and very excited to get out there and walk with us.

All along the way we had all kinds of walkers from many, many states and all the different classes.

So I think we had over 400 registrations in total.

[serene music] [happy music] We walk on average 20 miles a day.

We usually started between 7:15 and 8:00 AM and we usually finished up, oh anywhere between three and five o'clock.

We took breaks, snack breaks, stretch breaks, bathroom breaks, lunch breaks.

- Nap breaks.

We had to take a couple nap breaks during the lunch break.

- That's right.

- Lunches were fabulous.

They were very important.

They were ideally at mile 15.

So we had already gotten maybe three fourths of the day behind us before we settled in and they were often picnic lunches that Lisa or an area alum would put together for us.

- No, she's gonna ride.

- There were not often lunch spots available.

We weren't in places where there were businesses or restrooms.

So I mean it was a necessity to have a picnic.

- So will you all be coming back.

through here too?

- No, we started at Pennsylvania 500 miles one way.

- Oh, okay.

- Once every 250 years.

I won't get to see you next time.

[laughter] - Yeah, we'll we'll document this so our future sisters won't remember to stop here.

- I told her we had a senior citizen lost wandering the store.

so.

- Got me.

- Yeah.

Is is one right arm.

- Wow.

- How many miles?

- Those are some road warriors.

- 250 miles plus some training miles.

- Wow.

- Mainly this journey has worn the soles off of my shoes.

- The starting for me was the hardest part.

To say I'm gonna do it and then to follow through and actually do the whole, the whole thing.

So my challenge was also I had some issues with my feet.

I started the walk with a sprained ankle from an injury in Colorado from the summer.

- That's very swollen.

- You got no bone there and it's bruised.

- And that because you change your stride and everything led to other problems with some blisters and stuff.

So that's the old one which finally popped.

- This is the new guy that really hurts.

- Is there a bandaid on it?

- No.

- Oh, goodness.

- It was getting too fat.

But I'm probably gonna do a little surgery, take a shower, get some neosporin.

I know that most people gonna say don't pop that blister but it has to be done and put some moleskin or something on it.

And get ready for a light 14 mile hike tomorrow.

- But I was able to walk through those.

There are lots of support, lots of times that you could stop and use the van for a blister.

You know, anything that you needed was in that van.

- Yeah, about day four or five, my heel in my left foot started hurting and I'd had a little bit of that in training and I had backed off and you know, stayed on the bike and rehabbed and it was fine.

But I think because we're walking on the shoulders of the road, so our left foot was dropping further than our right foot.

It was causing some stress and so that pain showed up and in the beginning I was sad to see it rear its ugly head.

There was a challenge with left heel at the beginning.

Went slowly for a few miles then it felt great.

So I walked quickly one uphill section of road without much shoulder, very light traffic.

So there was always.

- The worst part of pain is the fear that the pain brings because you are afraid that it might get worse or it might sideline you.

But if you kind of just realize that the pain is gonna be there, it's just you're gonna experience it as a sensation, it's not necessarily gonna get worse.

'Cause some days it didn't bother me at all.

Other days it was pretty bad.

But you just release the fear part of it and then you just deal with what actually was there.

- And then it says it helps to remember that any challenge we're facing in 2021 was a billion times worse in 1766.

I will take heel pain over swollen bloody feet and sleeping on wet leaves with fleas in the bed.

So that keeps it in perspective.

- We're very, very lucky that we actually had everything that we needed every moment of every day.

So the real challenge was just staying positive and taking those steps.

- Guys, I don't even think you all know it yet, but we took over six and a half million steps in our.

- Collectively we did.

- Today is October.

I have no idea.

I know it's day 15.

That's what I know.

- When I was compiling the spreadsheet to see some of the fun numbers and statistics we could collect from the journey, I realized our daily average steps was 41,772.

And when I saw that number and I realized 1772 was in there, I was like of course that's our average.

- Every morning Holt would choose someone from the group.

Sometimes it was one of this group and sometimes it was one of a larger group that might be with us and gave them the portion of the journal that pertained to what we were going to do that day.

Sometimes it wasn't a direct parallel but it was pretty darn close.

- The best day was the day where we crossed the James River.

It was on the exact same day that they, that Salome's group crossed.

- Oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh.

I didn't need a hand.

I did know that was coming.

[indistinct].

- It was very late before we reached the James River and made camp.

Our feet were full of blisters.

- So we knew we were on track and we were.. That was huge.

I thought that was a huge thing.

- Made me feel, I can't speak for anybody else, but almost made me feel that they were with us somehow.

That you could actually feel their spirit.

And when I think about one of the things that motivated me, it was knowing that folks had done this before us and being able to share that same spirit, that sense of adventure.

The courage that they showed was remarkable 'cause they didn't even know where they were going necessarily every single day.

[serene music] [serene music continues] [serene music continues] - It's a lot of [indistinct] going on right now.

- A typical day for me was to drop them somewhere and wave goodbye, make sure we had all our possessions.

'Cause occasionally they were strewn about.

- I'm always playing catch-up.

- Nobody left behind.

Let's do this thing.

- And then join the group about four or five miles in and say, well who needs what?

I also kept all of them on find a friend, 'cause everybody had an Apple phone and I caught the group and I could follow them and knew whether they were on trail or off trail.

Occasionally I would call them and say, have you noticed that three blocks back you might have gone to the right instead of the left.

Most of the time they were on trail 'cause Holt did a fabulous job of creating the trail maps.

But occasionally we would have to find someone and get them back on trail.

I would also say that it was interesting watching the group because everybody had good days and bad days and it was fascinating to watch the group support each other when one was having a down day, the rest of the group brought her along, or if one person was having a fantastic day, it would lift the entire group's morale.

I observed from a car, actually a 15 passenger van.

[mellow music] - Aha, that's amazing.

[serene music] [upbeat music] - This is my long laot billy goat brother.

[laughter] I think my favorite day was when we walked into North Carolina, when we crossed the state line.

- Pennsylvania, - Maryland, Virginia.

Done.

- Whoo hoo.

- Three states.

- You know, Hillsboro was also only two days away and there would be a big celebration in Hillsboro waiting for us.

It felt very much like we, we did it, we made it to North Carolina.

It's almost like a first finish line.

- Yeah, that was just a really moving day.

That was a great day.

It was a beautiful walk from Roxborough to Hillsboro and there was something about Hillsborough, just that sweet colonial town and we went to the girls' school there and the woman who showed us around was just phenomenal talking about the Burwell's commitment to girls' education.

So we all identified with that and then the mayor came and read her proclamation and that something about the way it was written, it just captured the spirit of what we were trying to accomplish.

- Now therefore, I Jen Weaver, mayor of the town of Hillsboro do hereby proclaim October 20th, 2021 journey to Salem Day in the town of Hillsboro and urge all residents to recognize the importance of educational opportunities for young women of the past as well as those of the present and future.

- I mean, I think there wasn't a dry eye on the porch.

We were all so moved by what she said.

- I got tears.

You're making us all cry.

- It was a real bonding experience for all of us together.

And then to see somebody outside of our group acknowledge and recognize and really touch the meaning of what we were doing, that was a great moment.

- Well the reason that I wanted to do this journey, I think I had two reasons.

One, I love a big physical challenge.

I love endurance and challenging myself that way.

But I really wanted to give back to Salem and honor Salem 'cause I feel like so much of me came from my time there and I'm so grateful to the community that decided that educating females was a really good thing that long ago.

And so I just wanted to celebrate with Salem.

- I was just amazed at the fact that Moravians as early as the 1600s were emphasizing women's education.

Famously there was a bishop being John Jimenez who said that women were equal to men as human beings, which was a radical idea in the 17th century.

- When I learned about what those women 250 years ago went through, it made me really reflect on what opportunities education provides to so, so many throughout the country and throughout the world, and particularly for women and girls to have access to education that can change their lives.

[serene music] - Salem's alumni are the best.

I mean they're just, they love the institution and anybody affiliated with the institution.

They're always to a fault, willing to do whatever it takes to help Salem students help other Salem grads.

At that sort of reaching back a hand to the next generation that I think permeates the institution.

- One of the real goals for this journey in the very beginning was reconnecting and energizing alums from across ages, across classes.

And in that purpose, how wildly successful was that.

We had alums that joined us along the way.

Some that walked four days, a couple of that walked over 300 miles of our 500 mile journey with us.

That was really important.

And also getting Salem and women and women's education more airtime, more visibility and allowing people to know more about that and the importance of both women's education and Salem.

- The founders of the college really wanted to make sure that women had access to an education.

What does that mission mean for you today in 2021?

- You know those women brought that spirit and the Moravians themselves have historically believed in educating women.

So we believe that's really important and frankly critical for the world as we move forward.

Salem.

- I think being in a single gender educational environment is still just as relevant today as it has been throughout the centuries because it creates opportunities for women and girls to lead.

- This school was groundbreaking in educating women long before anybody else was educating women and being the 250th class is so special.

I remember at our opening convocation as first years, they're like in our 250th class.

That's a huge feat and it speaks so much to the impact that Salem has had on women's education and continues to have today.

- I think that Salem really shows me and the girls who go here and current students like you matter and your voice matters.

- I love telling people about Salem.

I love sharing information, like letting them know that it prioritized women's education and progress for women.

So it's just very like exciting and I'm very grateful and proud that I went here.

- Good morning Walkers.

- Morning.

This is live 28.

[group cheers] - In some ways it was sad 'cause we'd had such a good experience together.

We knew it was coming to an end.

- There were so many times those last couple of days that I had such profoundly mixed emotions, profoundly.

And as I waled into Winston, I wasn't sure.

And Lisa, this touches on something you said, my friend.

Wasn't sure if I wanted to cry or rejoice because part of me said, oh my God, we made it, we're home.

And the other part of me said, oh my God, we made it.

It's almost over.

- You all had walked through Winston-Salem and you all arrived first at the Moravian Church and then everybody else arrived.

And then once we were all together and jumped up and down and sung and played and we had our barbecue sandwiches.

And I think it was special to just be able to spend that time together.

- It felt like its own little mini homecoming, intimately enjoyed amongst this small group of us.

- Okay, 1, 2, 3, cheese.

- It was really emotional walking into Betharaba right after that.

- It's just hard to describe what it felt like when those walkers came into Bethabara.

And we were standing there to greet them just as they were in 1766.

And a Moravian band was playing just as it was in 1766.

- That was exactly how the girls and women were welcomed when they arrived all those years ago.

And we were trying to replicate that.

[solemn music] - And then we went into the Gamine House and had a love feast just as they did in 1766.

And it was probably the most moving thing I've ever been involved with.

It was truly amazing.

[group cheers] - 14 are buried here, all blessedly within a few yards of each other.

- Each of us read a really little brief kind of bio about the girls who became women who died in Winston-Salem that were part of that original journey.

And then put a rose on their grave.

We got to say thank you kind of in person and felt really, really personal.

- I'm really excited.

It's a amazing honor.

And I might cry.

Maria Salome, you're our muse.

The now famous diary keeper was 16 years old when she made the move to Bethabara in 1766.

She married Tyco.

- It was, I don't know, I'm kind of overwhelmed just thinking about it.

It was really one of the more poignant parts of the trip for me.

- Okay.

I am not crying.

Just wanna let you know that we made it to Bethabara yesterday and right now we are preparing to leave Betharaba and head down to Old Salem.

- This is the last leg of the 500 miles.

We pulled the 500 miles from Bethlehem.

- Well, today is an absolutely gorgeous day.

We couldn't have had a better turnout, better weather, and I just cannot wait to walk with these incredible women.

- It was just hugely symbolic because the actual walk ended the day before in Bethabara.

The historical walk ended in Bethabara.

So for me, this was almost like, I don't know, the Olympic torch or whatever.

- We did it.

[indistinct].

- Bringing it home and lighting the flame.

It was kind of taking the past and say we honor you and now we're gonna move this forward to today.

And fast forward to the Salem of the future.

- Jumping ahead from 1766 to 1772 over the course of seven miles.

[group cheers] - Glad to be here.

[group cheers] [solemn music] - It's like [indistinct].

[group cheers] - It was a great opportunity to share with the rest of Winston-Salem and walk all over Winston-Salem.

I mean, it was quite a parade.

It was a victory lap.

[church bell chimes] - All the people who came out just to cheer and recognize it.

All the signs in the windows, all the, you know, I think of our public relations people, Steve and others who standing there with cowbells.

[solemn music] [group cheers] [drums play] [solemn music] You could feel it building all along the way as we left Corpening Plaza and began to get there.

Felt like we were walking towards something really exciting.

- I think we floated, I don't think we actually walked into Salem Square.

I think we were a couple feet off the ground.

- It just was the most amazing moment of everything coming together.

Everything that we'd worked for and everything that was so meaningful to all of us.

It brought us all together in one really spectacular moment.

- What a triumphant entry.

[crowd cheers] - Woo.

- We have raised generation after generation of disruptive women.

I personally want one of the major take homes to be for every person that's watched this to feel yes I can, to feel inspired, to reach for possibilities, to think about things as one step at a time.

And I can do anything I set my mind to.

Even if it feels like it's an impossibility.

When you think about going 500 miles, if you break it down into each day, it seems doable.

- If it had been easy, it would not have been a bonding experience.

But it was difficult.

And because it was difficult, it was fantastic.

[camera clicks] - Mulch.

- Yay, soft and squishy.

- Thank you there.

- I'll get it later.

- You say to yourself, well anybody can walk 25 miles in a day if you really set your mind to it.

If you start out at 4:30 in the morning and you rest, you can walk 25 miles.

But the thing that you don't think about is you gotta get up the next morning and want to do it again.

And you gotta get up the next morning and do it again.

And that is the challenge of the distance.