Portland Cement, Lehigh and Northampton Counties

My thoughts today are with two friends who are in the hospital; one of them I won't name out of respect for their family's privacy, but the other (who is quite open about it on his social media) is the Hometown Historian. Jon's always been a good friend to this blog, so please keep a good thought for him as he undergoes a difficult but necessary procedure.

I'm having trouble getting this week's blog post started through no particular fault of my own. No, it's the children who are to blame - my two younger cats, Kashi and Sashi, are living up to the nickname my friend Rachel gave them. She calls them "the chaos babies" and they keep trying to sit on my laptop keyboard. This is making it difficult to write, because I keep having to fix the 'additions' they're making to the post. But the history must go on, I suppose.

For this second quest of 2026, I'm staying relatively close to home and looking at the background of one of the Lehigh Valley's resident industries. I already touched on it quite some time ago, when the blog was still pretty new and I still lived within walking distance of the First Cement marker. The blog and I have since moved elsewhere, but then again, so has the cement industry.

First Cement, Coplay, Lehigh County

The subject of this blog post is unique in that it's the only one of these historical markers which I can visit by taking a fairly short and safe walk. The back of my residence is connected to Saylor Park, home of the Saylor Kilns, by the Ironton Rail Trail, where I've spent a lot of time since I moved here. A quick walk, or an even quicker bicycle ride, brings me into the little community of Coplay.

Despite the way it's spelled, Coplay is pronounced COP-lee. I recently learned the origin of the name; the borough is named for the Coplay Creek, which runs near it, and the creek in turn was named after Kolapechka, the son of Native American chieftain Paxanosa, who lived near the creek's origin point in Schnecksville. (As you might guess, growing up in the Lehigh Valley sort of requires you to be a very good speller.) Anyway, Coplay is a very small borough, with a strong industrial history that's partly due to the influence of our old buddy David Thomas. But that's for another day; today we're not talking about iron, but cement.

(Thanks to Facebook's Scott Nagy for pointing out a small error in this article.)