City of Easton PA Official history

In 1838, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, the owners of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, traveled to South Wales to meet the man who would eventually help them solve the puzzle of how to efficiently burn anthracite – David Thomas.

The small iron making business that started on the bank of the Lehigh River in 1840 rapidly transformed the county and all of the Lehigh Valley into the steel making capital of the world.

Established in 1849, Easton Cemetery is the earliest and best surviving example of a romantic parklike cemetery within the Lehigh Valley metro area.

By 1855, the Lehigh Valley Railroad was hauling passengers and coal along the same route as the Lehigh Canal.

By 1857, two railroads, the North Penn that went south from South Bethlehem through Montgomery County to Philadelphia, and the Lehigh Valley Railroad converged in South Bethlehem.

The original courthouse was erected in the square in 1765 and demolished in 1862, when the new, existing courthouse was built on the Seventh Street hill.The Great Square has been the site of the oldest, continuously operated outdoor Farmers Market since 1791.

By 1868, the partners had committed the resources of Bethlehem Iron to the manufacture of steel, the only company in the Lehigh Valley that made the investment, primarily because the Bessemer process was extraordinarily costly.

In 1873, when Bethlehem’s massive steel mill was opened, it was not the largest industry in the Lehigh Valley.

The process of making Portland cement -- mixing limestone, clay, shale, magnesium, and other chemical additives -- was discovered in England in 1890.

In 1895, the Easton School District assumed financial responsibility of library service to the community and for the formation of the Easton Public Library.

In 1913 an addition was added, again funded by Andrew Carnegie.