Emmaus, Lehigh County

October is here, which means that this utterly bizarre year is slowly drawing to a close. I've been trying to get out and enjoy the autumn sunshine while I can - this is actually my favorite time of year, in most respects - but it isn't always easy.

A fun little sidebar for my readers, before we get into the meat of this week's post. If you weren't aware, the PHMC has its own channel on YouTube, where they share a lot of videos related to Pennsylvania history. I recently participated in their webinar about how markers are selected and created. It was hosted by Karen Galle, my direct contact in the organization, and you can watch it here. It was really very interesting! Thanks Karen!

Now, about today's marker - it's a first for this blog. The majority of communities don't have their own specific markers, as the markers are more likely written about a person or location within the community's borders. There are some which do, however, and our subject today is one of them. I deliberately chose to write about this one today because yesterday, if he were still with us, would have been my beloved grandfather's 90th birthday, and this particular community has a connection to our family tree.

The marker is located on Main Street, on the grounds of
the public library

Emmaus is located in southern Lehigh County, and growing up in northern Lehigh County, I as a child somehow got it into my head that it was very far away. It isn't, and I honestly am not sure what gave me the impression that it was. I think part of it, however, was that my grandfather told me it was his father's hometown, and somehow that made it sound almost like a 'back in the old country' kind of thing.

Far away it isn't, but it is (by United States standards) most certainly old. The Lenni Lenape Natives were in the area, and in particular had a well-used path which traveled past a trio of springs and over South Mountain into what is now Bethlehem. They called the place Maguntsche, meaning "feeding place of the bears" or "bear swamp," and this was eventually transliterated by incoming Europeans as "Macungie." Macungie, as the locals know, is today the name of a nearby borough which was originally called Millerstown; my readers may recall that it was part of the backstory of the Fries Rebellion. Emmaus had the name first, however.

European settlers began moving into the area in the 1730s, and among them was a German man named Philip Kratzer, who is my direct ancestor. (He is the direct ancestor of a lot of people. Hello to my many distant cousins.) He's mentioned in History of Lehigh County, by Charles Rhoads Roberts, as being the owner of a home which was attacked by Natives at some point; the book is over a century old and the wording is not kind to the Natives, so it's hard to say exactly what happened. What's known for sure is that he settled in what is now Emmaus on land that was given to him by the sons of William Penn, and in 1734, he built Shelter House.

Shelter House is mentioned on the Emmaus marker, so I'm going to give it a little special attention here. At the time of its construction, it was not called Shelter House; the settlers called it zufluchtshaus, which translates literally from German as 'house of refugees.' It was a place where new people in the area could take shelter until their own new homes were built, find protection from the weather and Native or British hostilities, and eat a decent meal. It sits very close to those three springs and the Lenape path I mentioned, and it's worth noting that this log cabin is not a reconstruction - it is literally the same one that my ancestor built almost 300 years ago. The first floor was built in 1734 as stated; in 1741, they added a second story.

Philip bequeathed the house to his son Friedrich, who in 1764 sold it to a man named Tobias Wandel. By that time, the Moravians had moved into the area and begun the establishment of a Gemein-Ort - literally, a "congregation town" - on the land that is now Emmaus, which was donated by Jacob Ehrenhardt and Sebastian Knauss for this purpose. The official founding date of Emmaus is given as 1756, at which time it was variously called both Macungie and Salzburg; in 1761 it was given the name of Emmaus, after the Biblical location in Israel where Jesus was said to have appeared following the Resurrection. 

Shelter House is located at what is now 601 South Fourth St.

With the Moravians creating this closed community, the Shelter House was no longer needed for the purpose of protecting refugees, and it became a private residence for the next two centuries. The last person to live there, Marcus Iobst, passed in 1952, after which money was raised for its restoration and preservation. A great deal of work has been done to protect the original logs from further deterioration and to maintain the interior as it might have looked back in the Colonial era, and since 1963 the Shelter House (now officially called by that name) has been owned by the Borough of Emmaus, and maintained by the Shelter House Society. It is definitely the oldest structure in Emmaus, and is believed to be the oldest continuously-inhabited home in the Lehigh Valley. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978.

Also, it has a cat. When Philip Kratzer and his family came over from Germany, they brought along the family cat, and tradition had dictated that there be a cat living in Shelter House ever since. Might be hard to see, but the cat is actually sitting in the left-hand window of the house in my photograph.

Coming back to the Moravians, they were quite busy in getting Emmaus up and running. At the time of its founding, it was one of the four largest Moravian settlements in not just Pennsylvania but all of North America, the others being Nazareth, Lititz, and of course Bethlehem. Although the original settlers were of the Lutheran and Reformed faiths, they eventually merged into the Moravian church, in part because ministers for their own traditions were difficult to find. One of these was Jacob Ehrenhardt, whom I mentioned as having donated land for the establishment of the Gemein-Ort; he converted to the Moravian faith and raised his children in the same. His son, Jacob Jr., built a beautiful stone house for his own family near the Moravian church, and though he was excluded from the faith for a time because he joined the militia, he was eventually allowed to return and is buried with his father in the Moravian cemetery. If you're familiar with the NASCAR drivers Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr., they are directly descended from Jacob Ehrenhardt Jr., and Dale Jr. has paid a visit to the family home, now known as the 1803 House. Like the Shelter House, the 1803 House is a protected jewel of the historical community; it is maintained by the Friends of 1803 House as something of a time capsule of Moravian Emmaus, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. (I wasn't able to get a picture on my birthday visit to the borough, but hopefully I can get back there very soon and add one to this post.)

And yes, Count von Zinzendorf was there. Like I keep saying, the man's been everywhere.

Emmaus Public Library

The 19th century saw a lot of changes brought to Emmaus, partly due to the nearby discovery of iron ore. In 1859, the same year that Emmaus was formally incorporated as a borough, the East Pennsylvania Railroad came to town, increasing their ability to engage in manufacturing and business. Over the next several years, Emmaus acquired several new industries; the first blast furnace was established in 1869, and multiple companies (the largest being Donaldson Iron Company) made cast iron pipes and other products. Silk and cigar production were also major industries for the borough. In the early 20th century, Emmaus expanded its borders to include several smaller neighborhoods on the outskirts, such as Vera Cruz, Salisbury Township, and Upper Milford Township.

Emmaus has a fairly unique and arguably amusing controversy regarding how it's spelled. Until 1830, the name of the community was spelled as Emmaus, like it is today; however, from 1830 until 1938, this was changed to the Pennsylvania Dutch spelling of Emaus. That's a simplification, though, because to write it in proper Pennsylvania Dutch requires you to draw a little line over the M, indicating the presence of a double letter. I tried to find an example of that online and could not, unfortunately. So it was still the same name all along, just written differently; but with Pennsylvania Dutch becoming less and less prevalent, that little line was often forgotten and people became confused about how the word was spelled. This also led to people being confused about how it was pronounced - the name is Ee-may-us, but some were calling it Ee-mouse or even Ay-moss. To get everyone back on the same page, it was officially returned to the double-M spelling in 1938.

Today, Emmaus is regarded as an excellent place to live, and has been recognized with multiple commendations and awards. CNN's Money Magazine has twice declared it to be one of the Top 100 Places to Live in the United States. Various other publications have ranked it as the fifth safest community in the commonwealth, the fifth "most heart-warmingly beautiful small town in Pennsylvania," and the second best Pennsylvania community to "get away from it all." Emmaus has a lot of community pride but also a lot of community involvement and inclusion, and works to merge the traditional with the modern. It remembers its past but not at the expense of the present, which can be tricky to do. Just remember: it has two Ms.

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Sources and Further Reading:

Borough of Emmaus official website

Official website of Shelter House

Official website of the 1803 House

Roberts, Charles Rhoads, with Rev. John Baer Stoudt, Rev. Thomas H. Krick, and William J. Dietrich. History of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, and a Genealogical and Biographical Record of Its Families. Lehigh Valley Publishing Company, Ltd., Allentown, PA, 1914.

Whelan, Frank. "1803 House is symbol of Emmaus origins." Published in The Morning Call, Allentown, PA, August 30, 1987.

Hartzell, Dan. "Emmaus: Mystery of missing "m' solved again." Published in The Morning Call, Allentown, PA, May 24, 2002.

Emmaus 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.