At about age 15, Benigna traveled to British North America with her father and fellow Moravians, beginning a 14-month missionary sojourn in the colonies.
In December 1741, fifteen-year-old Benigna Zinzendorf crossed the Atlantic with her father, Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, and a party of Moravian missionaries bound for British North America. The voyage was part of the broader Moravian effort to establish missions among European settlers and Native American communities in the mid-Atlantic colonies.
This journey was extraordinary for a young woman of her time and station. Rather than remaining in the relative comfort and safety of Saxony, Benigna embarked on an arduous transatlantic voyage into an unfamiliar and often dangerous frontier environment, reflecting the Moravians' unusual willingness to involve women, even very young ones, directly in missionary work.
During her approximately fourteen-month stay in the colonies, Benigna assisted with the Moravians' evolving educational and religious work among German and English settlers as well as Native American peoples in Pennsylvania. Her presence and participation were not incidental; the Moravian community viewed the education and spiritual formation of children and women as integral to its mission, and Benigna was being prepared to take a leading role in that effort.
This American sojourn set the stage for the most consequential accomplishment of her life: the founding, within just months of her arrival, of what would become recognized as the first boarding school for girls in the British American colonies.