Catherine Drinker Bowen, Bethlehem, Northampton County

I'm writing this week's post in the company of my parents' cat, Edgar Winter. My friend Ed is technically a cat, but we like to call him "the cog" because he acts like a dog in many ways. He wags his tail when he's happy, which combines very oddly with the purring. I also maintain that he's part Klingon, because when he wants attention he is very hard to deter. (He clings on. Therefore, a Klingon.) He also really dislikes to be home alone for extended periods of time, so here I am.

Anyway, he's supervising this post, in between monitoring squirrel activity in the side yard and taking his fifteenth nap of the day. My subject has nothing to do with cats, so he's not overly enthused. I, on the other hand, am delighted with it. Today we're talking about a woman born and raised in Pennsylvania, who spent part of her life in Northampton County, and who lacked much in the way of formal training yet nevertheless emerged as a prolific, talented, and acclaimed writer of history. You know, kind of like I'm trying to do.

Lehigh-Lafayette Football Game, Bethlehem and Easton, Northampton County

The weather this week has been really hard on me. I've been taking pain medicine at night in order to be able to sleep. Between the excessive heat warnings, the (sometimes fulfilled) threat of thunderstorms, and the rising humidity pushing the barometer down, I haven't been exactly well. My longtime readers know that I'm very much at the mercy of the weather for a lot of things, and it's hard to be awesome when you don't want to move. But I'm doing my best here.

Being subject to the weather isn't helping with another problem - I'm running low on stockpiled markers, as I've mentioned. I'll be fixing that a bit in the coming weeks; I have a planned day trip to Schuylkill County near the end of July to collect markers with a college friend, and a few other possibilities up my sleeve. I have some plans for posts on the other blog as well, such as next month when some of my friends and I go to Dorney Park in Allentown and celebrate the 100th birthday of the roller coaster Thunderhawk.

All of that is to tell you why this week's post is about a football game. I just collected the second of the two relevant markers during a trip to Bethlehem with best friend Andrea last week; we were a little bored, the weather was decent, and we decided to grab a few markers in the nearby city and follow up with ice cream at the historic Bethlehem Dairy Store, familiarly known as "the Cup." I'd heard of it but never been, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in the vicinity of Lehigh University. A proper marker hunt always involves ice cream, you know, it's a rule.

Gemeinhaus, Bethlehem, Northampton County

I'm once again starting to run out of my stock of markers! I haven't had the opportunity to do a great deal of marker hunting this spring, though I'm hoping to get out next month and collect a few. My best friend Andrea and my sister Liza are both interested in accompanying me on an excursion to Concrete City up north, and I have a handful of other destinations on my radar, so we'll see how that goes.

For this week's quest, I'm venturing back to Moravian Bethlehem, one of my favorite historical places, and showing you around the beautiful Gemeinhaus. When I last had a visit from my dear friend Rachel, who moved out of state, she requested that we spend a day in Bethlehem, where she had grown up. I was more than happy to oblige, and she took me around several of the places she knew best. That included today's destination, where she used to work as a tour guide.

Bethlehem Steel Plant, Bethlehem, Northampton County

Zenkaikon was - as always - exactly what the doctor ordered for me. My presentation about "The Red Rose City: A History of Lancaster" (and also my second presentation about Welsh history and language) went extremely well and I was very excited! I had wonderful attentive audience members who asked great questions and really wanted more stories, so I've promised to come back next year and provide them. Hello to everyone who has found their way here because of the convention, and thank you for checking out my passion project!

The April newsletter went out a few days ago - if you haven't seen it yet, you can find it here. I'm hoping to do something interesting for my subscribers in the coming months, so please consider subscribing. (It's free!)

I came back from the convention and got sucked right into a week of work, so I just had no time to do a blog post last week. Heck, I barely remembered to get the newsletter done. But this week I'm going to stay right here in my adopted county of Northampton, and take a look at one of the Lehigh Valley's biggest industry titans of bygone days. Bethlehem Steel has a couple markers, actually, which we'll be examining in coming posts; today, we're going to visit the actual plant... or what's left of it. This post has more pictures than usual, simply because I have been there so many times and taken so many pictures.

Moravian Community, Bethlehem, Northampton County

Before we dive into this week's quest, I'd just like to draw your attention to something new. As of a few days ago, the blog now has its own dedicated Twitter account! I'm using it to follow assorted historical organizations and news outlets and to help spread the word about events and discoveries in the commonwealth. Of course, I'm also using it to promote the blog itself. So if you've got a Twitter, please give MarkerQuest a follow.

For this week, we're going to mosey back to beautiful downtown Bethlehem and take a look at the Moravian community.

Old Chapel, Bethlehem, Northampton County

As of this writing, Moravian Bethlehem is still on the U.S. Tentative List to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. If you're not familiar with the term, these are locations around the world which have been recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). They have been determined to be unique landmarks with distinctive geographic and historical identities, which have cultural significance "of outstanding value to humanity." Right now, Pennsylvania only has two UNESCO World Heritage Sites to its name - Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece outside of Pittsburgh - so if the Moravian Community is selected for the honor, it will become our third. It's a process that takes years; they've been working toward this since 2002. You can keep tabs on the whole thing here - it's very exciting! I have every intention of being there for whatever celebration they decide to have for the occasion.

Well, with all the explorations I've been doing of other counties, I realized that I haven't done a Moravian Bethlehem blog post all year. So I'd say we're way overdue. This one is a little more picture-heavy than some of my posts, because I just couldn't bring myself to stop at three like I usually do.

Heckewelder House and John Frederick Wolle, Bethlehem, Northampton County

November, which Louisa May Alcott once called "the most disagreeable month," is a little more than halfway done. It was actually snowing earlier, and I don't really care for that at all. But I'm a little bit warmed by the knowledge that I will soon be receiving something special in the mail - a proof copy of my newest book, my very first history book! You might say it's a MarkerQuest side quest, as it doesn't focus on the subject of a marker; it's a bit of Lehigh Valley apocrypha which has been all but forgotten, and I'm looking forward to reviewing it and approving it for distribution. I will probably be able to confirm the launch and provide a link by the next time I update the blog, so stay tuned!

Meanwhile, for today's post we'll take yet another trip into the Moravian heart of Bethlehem. I did not originally intend for this to be a two-marker quest, but as I was putting the pieces together I realized that it made sense. Although the two markers are for different subjects, they have something very significant in common, and writing about one without the other just didn't feel right.

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Bethlehem, Northampton County

I'm celebrating two birthdays this week, after a fashion. One is my own; we spent the day at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which is currently hosting Madame Tussaud's wax figures of the Presidents (yes, all of them) as well as some other historic notables. This is a limited engagement, with restricted entrance due to you-know-what, and will only run until January 3rd of next year. I very much encourage my readers to go if you have the opportunity, because it was really awesome! We also spent part of the day running around gathering markers for this blog, because that's what we do when we go somewhere.

The other birthday takes place tomorrow. Poetry enthusiasts (like my friend Rachel, who first mentioned today's subject to me a few years ago) may already be aware that tomorrow will be the 134th birthday of one of the most unique voices of the 20th century.

Lafayette, Bethlehem, Northampton County

May is here, and it's actually starting to look like it where I live! Several of my neighbors have planted fields of canola, and it's a massive lift to the spirits to drive to the grocery store past fields of beautiful yellow flowers, stretching for acres. I'm so grateful to the farmers who decided to put in that crop.

I didn't know what to write for today's post. I'm actually starting to run out of my backlog of 'saved' subjects; I've done all of the markers I've collected for several counties. (That's not to say that those counties are done, just that I need more material from them.) My younger sister lives with us, and I remarked that today I needed to do a blog post. She wanted to know if I've written about bread yet, which as my longtime readers know, I have not. I've made bread - yesterday was my first attempt at homemade bread and it went very well; I have dubbed it "existential bread" because we joke that people are baking to stave off the sensations of existential dread. I'm probably not as funny as I think I am.

Anyway, I gave her two possible topics for today's post and she picked the one you're about to read. So it's partly because of Liza that we're learning about the Marquis de Lafayette.

The Unknown Soldier, Bethlehem, Northampton County

It's been a while since MarkerQuest went to Bethlehem, and I find myself missing it a little bit, so I thought that we'd welcome September (and celebrate my birthday) by heading back there. This is sort of a sequel to a previous post, which is always fun for me.

Last December, I talked about visiting the replica of the first house in Bethlehem, and how it was the place where the city received its name. In that post, I mentioned that the replica house includes a plaque related to soldiers buried on a nearby hillside, and how that's related to Bethlehem's very own Unknown Soldier, which is what I thought I would cover today.

David Tannenberg, Bethlehem, Northampton County

Once again I polled my Facebook followers to see which of two subjects they wanted me to cover this week. By a two-thirds margin, they voted for this one.

Burnside Plantation is a magnificent colonial estate nestled in a part of Bethlehem which, until I undertook this particular marker quest, I had never occasioned to visit. It's sort of tucked out of the way. The road leading to it branches off from Schoenersville Road, and this week's marker is found at the entrance.

Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, Northampton County

A special shout-out hello to Karen Galle, the director of the PHMC’s historical marker program, who recently emailed to say how much she's enjoying MarkerQuest! She suggested that I start including the county in the name of each blog post as well as the community, which makes sense to me, so thank you for the idea.

Words might be my bread and butter, but in today's post, I rely more heavily on photographs than I normally do. That's because it's sort of hard for me to adequately describe the treasures of the Moravian Archives.

The First House, Bethlehem, Northampton County

Because of the shifted update schedule, this will be the final MarkerQuest adventure for 2018; and because it's the week leading up to Christmas, I've been saving this specific subject for this very moment. Bethlehem is, as the locals know, "the Christmas City." What a lot of people might not know is that this isn't just because it's called Bethlehem - it's because it was literally founded on Christmas Eve.

The Old Waterworks, Bethlehem, Northampton County

The last weekend in September, some of my friends and I like to visit Bethlehem and attend the Celtic Classic, the largest annual Celtic festival in North America. A couple of my friends are Scottish, Andrea and my husband are Irish, and I myself am Welsh, so we have a pretty decent representation of the nations as we basically eat our way through the festivities. 

This year was nothing out of the ordinary. We listened to bagpipes, browsed the local vendors, and crossed the Monocacy Creek to the Colonial Industrial Quarter. This is where representatives of different Celtic and historical organizations in the United States set up their tents and share their stories. This is also where one of my quest markers is situated.

The Colonial Industrial Quarter is just off of Bethlehem's Main Street, with a walkway right next to the Hotel Bethlehem leading down into the earliest industrial park in the entire country. It was a significant portion of Bethlehem's Moravian community, which is an ongoing topic in several posts in this blog. The positioning of the quarter is deliberate, as the waters of the Monocacy Creek were absolutely vital to the operations. Some of the buildings are ruins - the pottery, the butchery, and the dye house have little to show for themselves nowadays. However, visitors can still enjoy two of the old mills, the tannery, the springhouse, the rebuilt smithy, and today's subject - the Old Waterworks.

The Sun Inn, Bethlehem, Northampton County

Today's blog post is about a building which can truthfully claim that "George Washington slept here." It's a slightly haphazard article, because it encompasses two visits and some technical difficulties. Like most of the other landmarks in the vicinity, the Sun Inn was part of the Moravian settlement of Bethlehem; its history, however, is very unique.

Moravian Cemetery, Bethlehem, Northampton County

By popular decree - meaning that I polled people on the Facebook page and this won by a landslide - my second post will cover the Moravian Cemetery in Bethlehem! The Moravian quarter is, of course, one of the most famous historical areas in the region; the Historic Bethlehem Museums & Sites organization is working on getting Bethlehem declared a UNESCO historical site because of this. That will be pretty awesome if it happens.

Edited 2/29/2024: This blog post is now available as a podcast episode! Learn even more facts about God's Acre by listening today on Spotify or your preferred podcast provider.