Northampton County: From Frontier Farms to Urban Industries – and Beyond
Written by Daniel Gilbert in the County Feature category and the Spring 1987 issue Topics in this article: agriculture, Allentown, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton Airport, American Civil War, American Federation of Labor, anthracite, Ario Pardee, Asa Packer, aviation, Bach Choir Bethlehem, Bangor, Belgians, Bethlehem, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, British, C.I.O., Charles M. Schwab, Congress of Industrial Organizations, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, David Brainerd, Democratic Party, Dixie Cup Corporation, Durham Furnace, Dutch, Easton, education, Erskine Hazard, Eugene G. Grace, Fries Rebellion, George Taylor, George Wolfe, Germans, Henry Gun Factory, Hungarians, Irish, iron, Italians, jasper, Jim Thorpe (town), John Fries, John Fritz, Josiah White, labor, labor movement, Lafayette College, Lehigh Canal, Lehigh County, Lehigh River, Lehigh University, Lehigh Valley Railroad, Lenape Indians (Delaware Indians), limestone, Mauch Chunk, mills, Moravian College, Moravians, Native Americans, Nazareth, New Deal, Northampton County, Northampton County Area Community College, Pardee Hall, Penn Family, Poles, Presbyterian Church and Presbyterians, Robert H. Sayre, Scots Irish, Slovaks, Slovenians, steel, Sun Inn, textiles, Thomas Penn, United Steel Workers of America, Walking Purchase of 1737, Welsh, William Penn, World War ISweeping across southcentral Pennsylvania lies the Great Valley and nestled in its northeastern corner is modern Northampton County. Bordered on the east by the Delaware River, on the south by South Mountain and the piedmont, and on the west by the valley of the Lehigh River, the three hundred and seventy-two square mile region is one of gently rolling hills and wooded valleys, with “drylands” stretching across the middle.
During the colonial era, the area lay on the western reaches of the home of the Lenni Lenape Indians, who lived winter and summer along the broad Delaware River. Although few Indians apparently lived in the region comprising today’s Northampton County, they left a legacy of trails, the routes of modern highways, and Indian names. There exists evidence of small settlements near Easton, Bethlehem, Northampton, Nazareth and Cherryville in the northern tier of the county; the Native Americans mined jasper in the hills bordering the county to the south.
While the region was first penetrated by Dutch traders, permanent European settlement began in the early years of the eighteenth century when German farmers from lower Bucks County and the Perkiomen Valley, as well as Scots-Irish of New Castle, came north into the valley of what was then called the Left Fork or West Branch of the Delaware (now the Lehigh) River. The Germans were attracted by the limestone soil and settled throughout the valley. But the Scots-Irish chose to live in a broad band (noted as the “Irish settlements” on early maps), from today’s Catasauqua on the Lehigh River across the county east to Martins Creek on the Delaware and in the northeastern corner of the county where the legendary Presbyterian missionary David Brainerd established his base of operations.
Originally the area was part of Bucks County, but traders and land developers in Philadelphia soon discerned the region’s potential. Fearing competition from the New Jersey colony to the east, they moved to establish a settlement at Easton in 1752. That year the proprietary group close to the Penn family recognized the possibilities of weakening the frontier Germans’ political power by isolating them in the new Northampton County, named for the estates of Thomas Penn’s father-in-law at Easton-Neston in Northamptonshire, England. Even before this occurred, a small band of Moravians had settled in 1740 at Nazareth and a year later at Bethlehem. A pre-Reformation group drawn to the New World for missionary purposes, the Moravians had first worked among black slaves in the West Indies and the Indians of Georgia before settling in Pennsylvania to establish their home congregation. Under their charismatic and controversial leader, Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf, they hoped to bring the Gospel to the Indians on the frontier as well as to work, in an ecumenical spirit, among the “unchurched Germans” of eastern Pennsylvania and beyond. At Bethlehem the Moravians created a self. sufficient center for their work, including an economy based on more than fifty-five various trades and industries.
Northampton County originally encompassed a vast, unsettled region from Bucks County in the south to the New York boundary in the north and beyond the Susquehanna to the west. It was to be administered at Easton, a small trading center near the southeastern corner of the county. Easton, almost isolated from the county’s farms and settlements in an era of poor, virtually non-existent communication, served Philadelphia interests well as a center for their land, trading and political intrigues. It also became a frequent site of conferences with the Indians during the colonial period.
While most of the Lenni Lenape in the region had moved west by the 1730s, remaining members of the older tribe, as well as Indians of central New Jersey, resisted white encroachment. Heirs of William Penn, beset with debts and eager to profit by the lucrative frontier, attempted to secure title to the area before engaging in the dubious Walking Purchase of 1737, by which they acquired much of today’s Northampton County and regions to the north and east in what is now Carbon and Monroe counties.
The Revolutionary movement came late to the frontier, but by the 1770s activists in Easton, as well as in what is now Lehigh County to the west, had embraced the patriot cause. One of them, the former Durham ironmaster, George Taylor of Easton, eventually signed the Declaration of Independence. By 1776, an active Committee of Observation in the county developed support for the Revolution and acted as a provisional government. Simultaneously, revolutionary leaders in the valley joined in the writing of the radical Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776.
The frontier location of the valley precluded the region becoming a battlefield during the Revolution; in fact, British armies never ventured within fifty miles of the county. Patriot forces could operate at will in the area, and the county became an important communications, supply, hospital and refugee center during the early years of the war. Bethlehem’s Moravians found themselves in a difficult position, however. As members of an “ancient Protestant Episcopal Church,” they had enjoyed the protection of Parliament since 1749, and their pacifism, combined with their concerns for their missionary work, argued for their remaining neutral. Always regarded by the county’s Germans and Scots-Irish as outsiders, the Moravians at Bethlehem and Nazareth found themselves at odds with the American Revolution because they refused to take oaths to the new government or to serve with its forces. But the war engulfed Bethlehem (along with frontier Easton and Allentown) as Revolutionary leaders were drawn there by the availability of large buildings and repair facilities, to say nothing of the exemplary hospitality of the historic Sun Inn. Refugees flocked to Bethlehem following the 1777 campaigns near Philadelphia, and its stout Germanic-style structures became hospitals for the wounded, many of whom died during the terrible winter of 1777-1778. Prominent revolutionary heroes, inducting Pulaski and Lafayette, recuperated in the little town. The Moravians hoped their warm reception and vigorous lobbying of American Revolutionary leaders would give them legal sanctuary under the new regime. But not for several years after the Revolution did the Moravians make their place in the new nation – it was Easton that emerged as the regional center of power.
The period from the American Revolution to the opening of the Lehigh Canal in 1829 has been called the “Age of Agriculture.” Except for the small training center at Easton and the self-contained community of Bethlehem, the region was dominated by the rarely changing Germanic farm culture. Occasionally, outside events intruded, such as when support developed for the new federal Constitution of 1787. Perhaps the most famous local incident was the Fries Rebellion or the Hot Water Rebellion of 1798. The Adams administration, eager to develop national defense, had decreed a direct tax on the nation’s households. Not long afterwards, assessors arrived in the county – only to be repulsed with hot water thrown from second story windows by German housewives. The Federalists retaliated, dispatching marshalls to arrest the resistors (principally in what is now Lehigh County), but they were met by militia led by Bucks County auctioneer John Fries. In a scene similar to comic opera, the federal marshalls and their captives were surrounded in Bethlehem’s Sun Inn and the prisoners released. Later, the Adams administration tried and convicted the leaders of the rebellion before finally pardoning them on the grounds that frontier Germans had presumably not understood. The Republic may not have been threatened, but the long-standing loyalty of the German farmers of the county to the Jeffersonian Democrats was never doubted after the event.
A more important development during this era was the successful petition of the residents of the western reaches of the region to establish Lehigh County in 1812, with its seat at the new Northamptontown or, as it came to be called, Allentown. So began the gradual reduction in the size of the original Northampton County, a process not completed until 1843. Whether the result of the residents’ frustration with the long trip to Easton or the ambitions of land developers and commercial interests, the establishment of Lehigh County created a fateful split of the valley into two competing political units, a division which plagues regional development even today.
The peaceful agrarian way of life in the county ceased with the opening of the Lehigh Canal. Handicraft industries had been operating in the area, including the famed Henry gun factory in Bushkill Township, and various trades had flourished at Bethlehem, Nazareth and Easton. But it was the canal which brought the Industrial Revolution to the valley. Built between 1827 and 1829 to carry anthracite from the Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) area to the Philadelphia market, the towpath waterway was linked to the nearby Morris Canal, running across New Jersey to New York, and to the Delaware Canal, connecting the region to the metropolitan Philadelphia area. Development of these new transportation systems attracted new residents to the county and initiated the steady decline of the region’s rural culture.
Most dramatic was the rise of the iron industry. Iron furnaces roared throughout the region during the colonial era; the famous Durham furnace was only a few miles south of the present Northampton County line. The furnace operations took advantage of the readily available local iron ore, great limestone deposits and the seemingly endless supply of trees to make charcoal. In the 1830s, a new and more efficient method of making iron using “stone coal,” as anthracite was called then, was developed simultaneously in the United States and England. The same interests which had built the canal quickly realized the possibilities of hauling local minerals with their coal via the waterway. Importing the new process and the technicians from England, they opened the first iron works in what is now Catasauqua in Lehigh County in 1840. Within two decades furnaces dotted the area along the canal with major enterprises centered near Easton, Glendon and South Bethlehem. By the Civil War, the river valley was the center of a major iron industry; one historian has characterized it as “the American Ruhr Valley.” While subsequent depressions in 1873 and 1893 caused a decline in much of the local iron industry, the county would never be the same again. In time, canal transportation was augmented by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, completed from Mauch Chunk to Easton in 1855. This and other railroads soon combined to end the isolation of the older rural communities and to connect the valley and county to New York City, Philadelphia and even Boston.
While the first communities to evidence the new developments were Easton at the eastern terminus of both the canal and the railroad and Allentown in nearby Lehigh County, the Bethlehem area underwent the most dramatic transformation. The Moravian community on the north side of the Lehigh River had abandoned its church control by 1845, but it slowly relinquished its older craft industries and reluctantly welcomed the new industrial and immigrant culture. On the south side of the Lehigh River, where the Lehigh Valley Railroad met the railway line from Philadelphia, a new industrial center emerged. On the site of an older iron furnace and zinc mill, a major mill town with a growing immigrant population blossomed during the late nineteenth century.
Along with a few consolidated mills in Lehigh County to the west, the Bethlehem Iron Works (later the Bethlehem Steel Corporation), under the direction of the John Fritz, successfully manufactured steel rails using the new Bessemer process and, later in the 1880s, produced armaments for the U.S. Navy. Meanwhile, the completion of a railroad network in the valley offered diversification to the county’s economy. By 1890 the value of manufactured goods totaled more than forty-one million dollars, and the number of factory workers increased dramatically. Flour milling and textile manufacturing, including silk mills at Easton and Bethlehem and slate quarrying in the northern section of the county, joined with an uncertain zinc industry and the iron furnaces to transform the county into a major industrial center.
Both Easton and South Bethlehem became centers for an emerging entrepreneurial elite and a more diverse population mix. Much has been written on the aggressive leadership of the canal builders, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, or the organizational genius of Asa Packer, who developed the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Often overlooked is the fact that these and other leaders brought both their skills and their capital into the county from outside the region. Illustrative of this development was the move of such leading entrepreneurs as Robert Sayre and their families from Mauch Chunk to the Bethlehem area after 1858. They created the Bethlehem Iron Company, built their stately mansions in neighboring Fountain Hill, opened a modern hospital, organized the Episcopal Church of the Nativity, founded academies for their children and supported smaller churches and clubs for the workmen. This era of benevolent paternal rule was not to last more than the first generation, but it left the region with some glorious architecture as well as important community resources. A similar pattern evolved in Easton, where the entrepreneurial elite lived near Lafayette College on prestigious College Hill.
Labor in the county’s mills was first drawn from the German farms of the region but these people were soon joined by immigrant groups, including the Irish, Welsh, British and Belgians. While German immigrants tended to settle in Lehigh County, Northampton County attracted the “new” immigrant, and by the 1880s Hungarians, Slovaks, Slovenians, Poles and, finally, Italians were present in significant numbers. Sixty-seven different ethnic groups settled in South Bethlehem alone by 1917. Company towns soon became centers of a burgeoning pluralistic population with each group struggling to retain its own culture. Within a generation, however, their children began to move slowly towards Americanization. This pluralism may have added to social tensions in the county, but it enhanced the rich ethnic heritage still preserved in the county’s cities and towns today.
The growth of education was also part of the emergence of a modern Northampton County. Rooted in the earlier church schools of the region, education flourished by the mid-nineteenth century with the establishment of public schools. The growth was in part due to the work of county native Gov. George Wolff. In the latter part of the century, academies developed in Bethlehem and Easton to provide proper education for young ladies and to prepare young men to enter the emerging local colleges and universities.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, three institutions of higher learning served the county. Lafayette College, founded in 1826, grew slowly until the Civil War and with a new scientific curriculum and generous gifts from such benefactors as the Hazleton entrepreneur Ario Pardee, began to train leaders for the region’s new industrial culture. Lehigh University, built on South Mountain above the sprawling steel mills, opened in 1866 in Bethlehem. With the leadership and generosity of Asa Packer, Lehigh Valley Railroad magnate, it soon became one of the leading engineering schools in the East. By 1910 Moravian College, founded as a theological seminary a century earlier, had built its new campus on the north side of Bethlehem.
A definable social life developed in the towns during the late Victorian era. Northampton County communities established traditions of military reviews, marching bands, trotting tracks, literary societies and town baseball teams. In Bethlehem, the famed Bach Choir was founded in 1898. A thriving press in the county raised the level of public enlightenment while sustaining the rivalry of Easton and Bethlehem.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the urban industrial society continued to prosper. Easton, the county seat and later a consolidation of a number of neighboring towns, had become a thriving metropolitan center reaching across the Delaware into New Jersey. Modern Bethlehem emerged when the old Moravian community joined with South Bethlehem in 1917. The Bethlehem Steel Corporation, under the leadership of Charles Schwab and later Eugene G. Grace, grew to be the second largest steel producer in the nation. Dominating local employment and town culture, “the Steel” as it came to be called, became a major force in the development of such diverse enterprises as the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton (ABE) Airport, the local hospital and intensive urban renewal programs.
But the county’s economy consisted of more than the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Slate quarrying in the northern tier of the county flourished until World War I, its decline paralleled by the gradual disappearance of grain milling. The cement industry across the center of the county boomed after 1890 until it, too, began declining during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While the silk industry deteriorated after some initial success, the garment industry opened factories in the county to take advantage of cheap labor. By the post-World War II era, large and small shops punctuated the region from the slate belt on the north through the urban industrial centers along the Lehigh River.
The World War I period brought great prosperity to Northampton County. Bethlehem Steel Corporation at one point reached more than ninety-seven percent of its productive capacity. Prosperity continued through the 1920s, but Bethlehem and Easton came to be known as alleged centers of Prohibition era vice and crime.
But the Great Depression descended, and the area so heavily committed to industrialization felt its paralyzing blow. Bethlehem Steel, for example, hacked its employment rolls from more than fourteen thousand to less than six thousand. The declining economy prompted bankruptcies and bank failures. Government relief programs mushroomed in the county. County population declined as young people sought work outside the valley. It was not until World War II that the regional economy recovered, but the memories of those bitter, hardscrabble years still linger today.
Organized labor, long at odds with local industry, found heart in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and before long both the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations were active locally. It is estimated that ninety-seven percent of the cement workers were eventually unionized. Even more dramatic were the renewed confrontations with Bethlehem Steel. Rebuffed earlier, labor finally succeeded as Bethlehem Steel in 1939 recognized the United Steelworkers of America. The memories of this success and the bitter strike of 1941 have faded in recent years, but an important chapter in United States labor history was written in Northampton County.
Since World War II the county has continued to change significantly. On one hand, the area has upgraded its transportation systems with the completion of Route 22 in 1954, the commitment in recent years to the completion of Route I-78 south of the valley and the expansion of the airport complex. Yet at the same time travel on the broad highways and expressways has meant a bypassing of older communities and, paradoxically, the end of regular passenger rail service to New York and Philadelphia, isolating the region from its traditional metropolitan ties.
Population grows, but the demographic shift from the older industrial centers of Easton and Bethlehem to the new suburbs mushrooming in the rural townships has been most dramatic. This movement has plagued cities with declining populations and tax revenues, eroding the older retail centers and complicating older community and political ties. While many of the new suburbanites are children of older city residents, affluent newcomers with little sense of traditional ties have also relocated in the area to work in the burgeoning industrial and business parks which punctuate the valley. New consolidated school districts have further complicated the sense of older, familiar loyalties. Yet in the face of this, Bethlehem, Easton and Nazareth have undertaken significant efforts to preserve their identity by restoration of historic and older areas.
Meanwhile the economic base continues to evolve. As late as 1973, sixty percent of the county’s labor force was devoted to manufacturing, of which one-third is in the steel industry. Bethlehem Steel Corporation had, for example, reached an employment level of twenty-seven thousand employees in 1955, including thirty-five hundred in the general offices. But the recent decline in the fortunes of the company has been paralleled by the closing of Easton’s Dixie Cup Company and the area cement mills, leaving future employment patterns uncertain.
However, the new County politics have changed significantly. Traditionally a Democratic Party stronghold, the county has recently shown signs of a more balanced and vigorous party rivalry. The county voted in 1976 to adopt a “home rule” charter to develop a more modern system of representative government and professional administration of county affairs. The older rivalries still remain, however, with tensions continuing between the traditional center of power at Easton and the burgeoning populations near Bethlehem and Nazareth.
Culturally, the county is blessed with three private educational institutions: Lehigh University and Moravian College in Bethlehem and Lafayette College in Easton. In addition to Northampton County Area Community College, opened in 1966, they have provided a wealth of traditional and innovative educational opportunities, as well as diverse cultural programming. For traditionalists, the Bach Choir, Bethlehem, offers its annual festival in the spring and a special program during the Christmas season.
The future direction of county life is still not clear. Older smokestack industries with their large blue collar labor force pegging the city economies seem to be declining. The flight to the suburbs may also have begun to wane with the hope for restoration of the flagging economies of Easton and Bethlehem. But in spite of the uncertainty, Northampton County residents today think themselves blessed with the charm of a distinctly defined historic area and the best of urban and rural prospects close at hand.
For Further Reading
Alderfer, E. Gordon. Northampton Heritage. Easton, Pa.: Northampton County History and General Society, 1953.
Condit, Uzal W. The History of Easton. Easton: G. W. West, 1889.
Heller, William J. History of Northampton County. New York: AHA, 1920.
Henry, M. S. History of the Lehigh Valley. Easton: Bixler and Corwin, 1860.
Levering, Joseph M. A History of Bethlehem, Pa. Bethlehem: Publishing Co., 1903.
Northampton County Guide. Bethlehem: Times Publishing Co., 1939.
Daniel R. Gilbert, a member of the history department of Moravian College, Bethlehem, since 1953, is a graduate of Middlebury College. He received his master of arts and doctorate degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He served as executive director of Historic Bethlehem from 1973 to 1976. In 1975, he was elected a member and secretary of the commission which authored the Northampton County “Home Rule” charter. Currently he serves on the county’s Higher Education Authority. A frequent lecturer on the history and heritage of the Lehigh Valley, he teaches a course on the subject at Moravian College. His published articles on the region’s history include an article on Lehigh County which appeared in the summer 1978 edition of this magazine. The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Sue Gangwere, Martha Reid and Lance Metz in the preparation of this article.