The Liberty Bell spent nine months hidden under an Allentown church floor
When the British were about to take Philadelphia in 1777, patriots feared the State House bell would be melted into ammunition. Two farmers hauled it north by wagon to a small town on the Lehigh River and tucked it under the basement floorboards of Zion Reformed Church. That town was Allentown.
The bell stayed hidden from September 1777 until June 1778, through the whole British occupation of Philadelphia. Pennsylvania's governing council had ordered 11 bells taken down after the American defeat at Brandywine, and John Snyder and Henry Bartholomew carried the most famous of them to the church on Hamilton Street. The town also held Hessian prisoners and ran four hospitals for wounded Continental troops, and George Washington passed through with his staff after the victory at Trenton.
Allentown's founder, William Allen, was a rich shipping merchant who became mayor of Philadelphia just after buying 5,000 acres here in 1735. He laid out the town in 1762 as Northampton Towne, hoping it would outshine Easton and become a great trading hub; a rivalry with the Penn family may have spurred him on. He named many original streets after his own children, and his own name went on the main street.
Growth came in fits and starts. When the settlement became a borough in 1811, its first order was to move cows off the streets and into pastures, which went down badly. The Lehigh Canal, finished in 1829, shipped anthracite coal to New York and Philadelphia, and the town officially took the name Allentown in 1838. Then came a run of setbacks: a flood swept away the chain bridge in 1841, the local bank collapsed in 1843, and fire gutted the business district in 1848.
Recovery followed with brick rebuilding and, in 1852, the first Allentown Fair, still one of the longest-running annual fairs in the country. Today Allentown is Pennsylvania's third-largest city, with 125,845 residents in 2020, sitting 48 miles north of Philadelphia.
Source: Allentown, Pennsylvania
