West Salem is a village in Edwards County, Illinois, United States. The population was 786 at the 2020 census, down from 897 at the 2010 census.

The West Salem area was established in the 1830s and to the lead 1840s by Moravians primarily from Salem, North Carolina, and Hope, Indiana. Among the to the front settlers were Adam Hedrick and Peter Hinkle.

From 1841 to 1846 the further Moravian settlers were keen with the headquarters of the southern province of the Moravian Church in Salem (Old Salem), North Carolina, in establishing a congregation. William Eberman, the Moravian pastor at Hope, Indiana, was sent to visit and preach for them in the fall of 1841. Many extra settlers followed, until by 1843, more than 80 families lived within a 3-mile (4.8 km) radius of what was to become West Salem, most of them Moravians. But in 1843, it was Martin Hauser, a Moravian house missionary furthermore from Hope, Indiana, who would be instrumental not lonely in starting a Moravian Church, but as well as in helping to establish the town. On Saturday, May 25, 1844, a meeting was held in Peter Hinkle’s barn, where heads of 15 families came tackle and signed the Brotherly Agreement and Constitution that formed the extra Moravian congregation. On his way house to Hope, in 1845, Hauser stopped at the federal home Office in Palestine, Illinois, to buy, in the reveal of the church, 120 acres (0.49 km) of land on which West Salem is presently located. He was acting as attorney-in-fact for Rev. Charles Kluge, President of the Synod of the Southern Provincial Conference of the Moravian Church of North America.

In the years that followed, the other community of West Salem began to proliferate but furthermore to experience challenges as well. In 1849, more than 60 immigrants from Germany arrived, hoping to build homes and gravitating towards the Moravian Church. They were pleasantly received, but back long bother developed surrounded by the Germans and the indigenous English-speaking settlers. Language differences caused ration of the difficulty, but the passй German ideas and customs extra to it. The congregations at odds into “divisions”, one English and one German, each in the same way as its own credited board and its own pastor, but sharing the use of the church building and cemetery. After nine years of this arrangement, they became two cut off congregations on February 7, 1858. The Germans retained the passй church, and the English built a supplementary church upon the south side of the public square. This building was dedicated upon August 14, 1859. The English retained the dated cemetery, while the Germans laid out a cemetery adjoining it. On April 10, 1892, the German congregation dedicated a supplementary building, the gift Moravian Church. Eventually the German American work began using the English language and gradually came to take American ways. On June 13, 1925, the two congregations were reunited. The two cemeteries, which were gradually growing together, also were allied at that time.