Trucker's Mill, Slatington, Lehigh County

July is almost over, which is jarring to realize when you consider what a weird year this has been. The summer is flying, almost like 2020 itself is in a hurry to be finished. I hope my readers all continue to be well and safe.

Tomorrow would have been my maternal grandmother's 89th birthday if she were still with us, which is also hard to imagine, and she and my grandfather would be celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary. (Pop always said they got married on her birthday so he didn't have to worry about remembering two different dates. I always said he was the smartest man I ever knew.) So in honor of the occasion, I thought that this week I'd wander back over to Nana's hometown of Slatington, to talk about some of Pop's ancestors. It always sounded a little peculiar in my head, but while it's my grandmother who grew up in the little borough, it's my grandfather whose family founded the place.

The marker is situated on the General
Morgan Bridge (connecting Slatington
and Walnutport), near the intersection of
Main and Diamond Streets

Last year, I told you about the First School Slate Factory in Slatington, and I explained how Nicholas Kern was the first European settler of the area. He sailed out of Holland aboard the Adventurer and arrived at the Port of Philadelphia; having purchased a large tract of land in what is now northern Lehigh County, he established residency and raised his seven children. As I mentioned in that post, there were and are a lot of Kerns still in the area, and the reuse of given names causes the genealogy to get a little fuzzy in places. The family tradition indicates that we're descended from Nicholas's son George Jacob; however, Nicholas's brother Christopher also had a son with a similar name, so you can see where there's some confusion about which one is my actual ancestor. But what I know for sure is that my great-great-grandfather was Penrose Kern, and we're related to these Slatington Kerns through him.

While Slatington is best known for its slate (as the name suggests), Nicholas wasn't actually involved in its discovery or the industry which arose from it. He built a log cabin at what is today the intersection of Main and Diamond Streets; the cabin is long gone, of course, but occupying the site now is a building known as the Benjamin Kern house, built in the 1890s by one of Nicholas's relations, and the marker is located nearby. Not too far from there, along the banks of the Trout Creek, he established a sawmill, which also no longer stands, and he began to make the family's fortunes with the wealth of timber to be found in that particular corner of Penn's Woods.

The site of the mill was chosen strategically. It was near the spot where the "Warrior's Path," a well-known Native American route used for trade between Weissport and Easton, crossed the Lehigh River. The Lehigh didn't have its own name in those days; it was simply regarded as a western branch of the Delaware River, and the whole region was largely uninhabited by settlers. The Kerns were the only immigrants to relocate there for many years, though by the time of the slate discovery in 1844, a couple other families had also started to occupy the land.

This map (click for larger version)
was made by Thomas Lynch
Montgomery as part of his report
on the location of frontier forts;
it shows the exact location of both
Trucker's Mill and the original
Kern family home. Available
courtesy of USGenWeb Archives.

Benjamin Franklin himself was a customer of the Kern sawmill. He purchased a lot of lumber from them to build the assorted forts with which he's associated in this part of Pennsylvania, including Fort Allen. There doesn't seem to be any indication that he actually visited the mill himself, but we know he did a lot of traveling in the region so it's certainly not out of the realm of possibility. I'm just surprised that there wouldn't be a record of it.

Well, Nicholas passed away in 1748, and the sawmill passed into the hands of his son William. He was a friendly kind of guy, known colloquially to his German neighbors as being a trockener - a joker. This devolved, as words sometimes do, into "trucker," and that's how the mill came to have that name. (A few documents give the alternate spelling of Drucker's Mill, but the marker says Trucker's and that's what I'm using.) In 1754 the French and Indian War began, and over the course of that conflict, Kern's Mill, or Trucker's Mill, came to be regarded not just as a sawmill but also a fort.

It was Thomas Lynch Montgomery who, in 1916, did the necessary sleuthing to track down just how this was situated. It took him some doing, as he knew that the fort existed but not exactly where, and it was only by reading through the commonwealth archives that he was able to find letters which clarified the matter. Captain Nicholas Wetterholt, or Weatherholt, was stationed at a fort "south of Lehigh Gap," which was ultimately confirmed to have been Trucker's Mill. One letter states that there were eleven men stationed there, offering the people protection from the dangers which threatened them; another references a store of powder and lead on the premises. The fort was variously named as "Kern's Fort" and "Dry Fort." How long it maintained this military importance isn't clear from Montgomery's report, but he does mention that the lumber for constructing Fort Allen was gotten from Trucker's. A letter written by Benjamin Franklin on January 25, 1756 states that his company traveled to the site of Fort Allen, "where we arrived about 2 in the afternoon, and before 5 had inclosed [sic] our Camp with a Strong Breast work, Musket Proof, and with the Boards brought here before by my Order from Drucker's Mill, got ourselves under some shelter from the Weather."

This D&L sign is situated where the old
Slatington High School stood at Second and
Main Streets, not far from the marker for
Trucker's Mill; the school was torn down in 2001.

Asa Packer's Lehigh Valley Railroad had a strong presence in the area for over a hundred years, including a station in Slatington, and the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor has established a number of informational signs along the old railroad lines, which have been converted into trails, as well as within walking distance of those trails. One of these is on the site of what used to be Slatington High School, the alma mater of my grandparents and their sisters. According to this sign (seen at right), the very first public school in Slatington was housed inside Trucker's Mill. "For nineteenth-century children, education was a luxury. The first school within the borough limits of Slatington was established in 1820, but only a small number of the town's children attended. The school was housed in the old stone mill of William Kern, known as Kern's Mill, formerly located at the bottom of the General Morgan Bridge."

The mill actually built by Nicholas Kern was torn down in 1850 and replaced with a new one by Jonas Kern, his great-grandson (William's grandson). When it was rebuilt, it was put in a different place, and the building later became a slate factory. This is why Montgomery had so much difficulty figuring out where the fort had been - by the time he did his research in 1916, the sawmill which had served that purpose was long gone, and many of the locals no longer remembered it at all. It was never a fort established by the actual government, as his report stresses, but rather a private business that just happened to also house a small garrison of soldiers to protect the locals. Montgomery, however, was firm in his belief that it should be respected as more than "the mere private blockhouse, used as a place of refuge." In fact, he was so impressed by its importance that he was the first one to lobby for it to receive a historical marker! The PHMC marker was erected in 1952, but almost forty years earlier, Montgomery made this plea for the significance of Trucker's Mill:

It was important, then, not merely as a saw mill, but, besides that, it was important from a military point of view, commanding, as it did, the routes of intercourse between Albany Township on the West to Nazareth and Easton on the East, as well as Bethlehem and Allentown on the South, and Forts Lehigh and Allen on the North. It would seem to me that the preservation of matters of importance in the history of the State should cause such a liberal view to be taken with regard to the placing of tablets as would assign one to this position.

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Sources and Further Reading:

Official website of the borough of Slatington

The Northern Lehigh Historical Society

Slatington Historic District at livingplaces.com

NorthAmericanForts.com

Trucker's Mill at the Historical Marker Project

Montgomery, Thomas Lynch. Report of the Commission to Locate the Site of the Frontier Forts of Pennsylvania, vol. 1, 1916. Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Georgette Ochs.

Nicholas Kern profile on Geni.com

NorthAmericanForts.com

Trucker's Mill at the Historical Marker Database

If you've enjoyed this, please leave a comment!

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Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.