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Our Vision
To collect, preserve, and celebrate the history of Lower Macungie Township |
The museum is open 1 to 4 p.m. on Sundays (except holidays or during special events) or by appointment. Admission is free to all. The museum will be closed if there is severe flooding, ice, or heavy snow on the roads. |
Lower Macungie Township Historical Society was founded in 1989, after a log house in Wescosville was moved to the nearby township park. Our first responsibility was to restore the building to its appearance in the nineteenth century. Today it has a number of typical furnishings and tools that would have been used by earlier generations of farmers and householders, and is open several times a year for the public to tour. An adjacent kitchen garden was recently expanded and contains plants that would have been common in the nineteenth century for medicines, ointments, food, and flavoring.
We invite you to enjoy reading about Lower Macungie on the pages contained in this website. To start, here is a very brief history:
Lower Macungie Township was settled in the early eighteenth century by German immigrant farmers, mostly of the protestant Lutheran and Reformed faiths. Most native Americans had moved out of the area before this. The Europeans found the rich, fertile soils and amply watered land to their liking and stayed here. Their first modest log homes and barns were soon replaced with large farmsteads as they cleared more land.
Lower Macungie dates from 1832, when Macungie Township (1743) was divided into Lower and Upper Macungie townships. These were the first two townships created after Lehigh County was erected in 1812. The township operated under Pennsylvania’s Second Class Township Code until 2008, when it changed to First Class with a legislative board of five commissioners replacing three supervisors.
For most of its history, the township was rural and agricultural, with villages at several crossroads. Pockets of iron ore were mined during the Lehigh Valley’s iron boom of the mid- to late nineteenth century, and limestone was quarried to use as flux in local furnaces. Clusters of trees and water-filled holes still mark the landscape where ore and limestone were extracted.
Until 1952, when several school districts merged to form the East Penn School District, the Lower Macungie Township School District owned several one-room and two-room school houses, spaced at convenient distances apart so that no child would have to walk more than a mile to school. A number of the old school houses have become homes. Until 1952, students who wanted to continue their education after eighth grade could attend high school in Emmaus or Allentown, often traveling there by trolley.
Until the 1960s Lower Macungie’s population remained under 4,000. During the 1970s many farms began to be built up with housing, others with commercial buildings, and population increased dramatically. The 2010 census recorded a population of over 30,000. Alongside the many new homes and businesses, remnants of the agricultural past can still be seen in the massive nineteenth-century bank barns and large stone farmhouses that remain.
To learn more, see the book store page for information on buying a copy of A History of Lower Macungie Township, also available at our meetings and events, and at the Lower Macungie Library.
We invite you to enjoy reading about Lower Macungie on the pages contained in this website. To start, here is a very brief history:
Lower Macungie Township was settled in the early eighteenth century by German immigrant farmers, mostly of the protestant Lutheran and Reformed faiths. Most native Americans had moved out of the area before this. The Europeans found the rich, fertile soils and amply watered land to their liking and stayed here. Their first modest log homes and barns were soon replaced with large farmsteads as they cleared more land.
Lower Macungie dates from 1832, when Macungie Township (1743) was divided into Lower and Upper Macungie townships. These were the first two townships created after Lehigh County was erected in 1812. The township operated under Pennsylvania’s Second Class Township Code until 2008, when it changed to First Class with a legislative board of five commissioners replacing three supervisors.
For most of its history, the township was rural and agricultural, with villages at several crossroads. Pockets of iron ore were mined during the Lehigh Valley’s iron boom of the mid- to late nineteenth century, and limestone was quarried to use as flux in local furnaces. Clusters of trees and water-filled holes still mark the landscape where ore and limestone were extracted.
Until 1952, when several school districts merged to form the East Penn School District, the Lower Macungie Township School District owned several one-room and two-room school houses, spaced at convenient distances apart so that no child would have to walk more than a mile to school. A number of the old school houses have become homes. Until 1952, students who wanted to continue their education after eighth grade could attend high school in Emmaus or Allentown, often traveling there by trolley.
Until the 1960s Lower Macungie’s population remained under 4,000. During the 1970s many farms began to be built up with housing, others with commercial buildings, and population increased dramatically. The 2010 census recorded a population of over 30,000. Alongside the many new homes and businesses, remnants of the agricultural past can still be seen in the massive nineteenth-century bank barns and large stone farmhouses that remain.
To learn more, see the book store page for information on buying a copy of A History of Lower Macungie Township, also available at our meetings and events, and at the Lower Macungie Library.
