Lehigh County
Allentown, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Formed March 6, 1812 from part of Northampton County and named for the Lehigh River. Home of George Taylor, signer of Declaration of Independence. County seat of Allentown sheltered the Liberty Bell during occupation of Philadelphia, 1777-1778.
The Story
Carved from Northampton County in March 1812 and named for the river that powered its early industry, Lehigh County anchored the Pennsylvania German heartland around Allentown. Its ground had already earned a place in Revolutionary lore: when the British occupied Philadelphia in 1777-1778, patriots spirited the State House Bell — later called the Liberty Bell — to Allentown, hiding it beneath the floor of Zion Reformed Church. The county was also home to George Taylor, one of Pennsylvania's signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Why it matters
It links a young Pennsylvania county to two touchstones of American independence — a signer of the Declaration and the safe-keeping of the Liberty Bell — showing how the Revolution's symbols were protected in the countryside while the capital fell.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early years of the nineteenth century, Pennsylvania was still sorting itself out. The great colonial counties drawn in William Penn's day had grown crowded and unwieldy as farms, mills, and market towns spread across the countryside. A settler with business at the courthouse might face a long day's ride just to record a deed or answer a summons, and the young state answered that pressure the way a growing republic does: it split the big counties into smaller, more governable ones.
That is the story behind the line drawn here in 1812. A new county was carved from the southern reaches of older Northampton County, and it was given the name of the river that had already shaped life in the region — the Lehigh, tumbling down out of the mountains toward the Delaware. Naming a county for its river was more than sentiment; the water was the highway, the mill-power, and soon the artery of trade.
This was the era of the Early Republic, a confident, restless time. The Revolution was within living memory, the Constitution barely a generation old, and Americans were busy building the everyday machinery of self-government — counties, courthouses, roads, and records — that would knit a young nation together.
People & events
The formal act came on March 6, 1812, when the new county officially took shape from part of Northampton County. It was, on its face, an ordinary piece of frontier-era administration: a boundary drawn, a county seat named, a courthouse to follow. But such acts were the quiet foundation on which American communities were built, and the people who did this work were the neighbors of the founding generation.
The county also claims a genuine Revolutionary pedigree, for it remembers George Taylor as one of its own — a Pennsylvanian who put his name to the Declaration of Independence. Taylor was an ironmaster by trade, part of the class of practical, hard-working men who turned the region's ore and water into the tools and, in time, the munitions of a young country.
To sign that document in the summer of 1776 was no small thing. It was an act of open defiance against the most powerful empire on earth, and every man who did it staked his life and property on the outcome. That a signer is honored on a county marker, alongside a plain notice of when the county was formed, tells you how closely the ordinary and the extraordinary sat side by side in early America.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to picture the men who signed the Declaration only in grand settings — candlelit halls, sweeping portraits, the ring of famous names. This marker quietly corrects that. It reminds you that the founders lived in real places, ran real businesses, and are remembered in ordinary American communities that carry on long after the speeches end.
The river that gave the county its name would go on to a large role in the national story. The Lehigh Valley became one of the engines of American industry, its anthracite coal and ironworks helping to power the country's rise as a manufacturing giant in the century that followed. The frontier act of drawing a county on the map was, in hindsight, an early chapter in that transformation.
So the marker joins two threads of the American story that are usually told apart: the founding generation that declared a nation into being, and the workaday builders who filled it in — county by county, courthouse by courthouse, mill by mill.
If you visit
Stand here and you are in the seat of a county that has been organizing the life of this valley for more than two centuries. The marker itself is modest, and that is part of its charm: it treats a Revolutionary signer and a routine act of governance as neighbors, set down in a few plain lines.
Let it send you looking outward. The Lehigh River is never far in this country, and its presence explains almost everything about how people settled, traded, and prospered here. If you follow it, you begin to see why the founders of the county reached for its name.
For a traveler, this is a fine reminder to slow down in the ordinary county seats of America. The famous stories were lived out in places just like this one — and a courthouse square can hold as much history as any battlefield, if you give it a moment of your attention.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · George Taylor
Related events
- · Hiding of the Liberty Bell in Allentown, 1777-1778
- · Formation of Lehigh County, 1812
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Liberty Bell Hiding Place
Allentown, PA · est. 2022
In the anxious autumn of 1777, with the British army marching on Philadelphia, the Continental Congress ordered the city's bells spirited away so they couldn't be melted into cannon. The great State House bell traveled north by wagon and rested for months beneath the floorboards of Zion's Reformed Church here in Allentown before returning home in 1778. Decades later, antislavery reformers seized on its inscription—'Proclaim liberty throughout all the land'—and renamed it the Liberty Bell, turning a cracked colonial bell into an enduring emblem of freedom.
Allentown
Whitehall, PA · est. 1947
Laid out in 1762 by the powerful colonial jurist William Allen, this Lehigh Valley town spent its first seventy years known as Northampton before taking its founder's name. In the anxious autumn of 1777, as the British occupied Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell was spirited here for safekeeping and Revolutionary wounded were nursed in the town. It grew through the 19th century into a humming center of textiles and cement, earning its city charter in 1867.
Allentown
South Whitehall Township, PA · est. 1947
William Allen, a leading colonial jurist, established this settlement in 1762; it answered to the name Northampton until 1834. In 1777 it sheltered the Liberty Bell from advancing British forces and hosted Revolutionary wounded. Incorporated as a city in 1867, it flourished as a center of textiles and cement manufacture.
Allentown
Allentown, PA · est. 1947
Allentown was laid out in 1762 by William Allen, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant and chief justice of colonial Pennsylvania, and was known as Northampton until 1834. Its most storied moment came in 1777, when patriots spirited the Liberty Bell out of Philadelphia ahead of the advancing British and hid it here, while the town also sheltered wounded Continental soldiers. Incorporated as a city in 1867, Allentown went on to thrive as a center of textiles and cement.