Saucon Source (https://sauconsource.com/tag/local-history/)
In a win for local preservationists, it was announced in late August that the historic Meadows Road Bridge in Lower Saucon Township has been added to the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s not really the time of year for thinking about swimming pools and swimming, but that’s what some volunteers from the Hellertown Historical Society have been doing.
The stone-walled Tavern Room in the historic Heller-Wagner Grist Mill came to life with the sights and sounds of Christmas at the Hellertown Historical Society’s annual Holiday Open House Friday.
Did you know that Lower Saucon Township has a ghost town of sorts? Buried in the brush–consumed by the ravages of time–along a section of Riverside Drive known as “the Narrows” is the former settlement of Redington, which thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a miniature center of industry.
The clock tower in Hellertown’s Detwiller Plaza has become a beloved borough symbol that appears on everything from Christmas cards to the patches worn by Hellertown police officers. But did you know that barely 30 years ago, it didn’t even exist?
A news account of a 1924 bank robbery at Hellertown’s Saucon Valley Trust Company reads like something straight of a pulp novel or a noir movie, with robbers who told the bank’s employees to ‘put ’em up,’ tied them up and made a dramatic escape out of town in a roadster.
In 2018 it is hard to imagine a time when it was possible to ride a horse down Main Street in Hellertown, but that’s the type of transportation that existed in 1879, when one of the borough’s first ordinances was adopted.
It wasn’t mentioned in his obituary, published on Saucon Source on Jan. 29, but in addition to his World War II heroism, his career at Western Electric and many other accomplishments, the late Joseph ‘Joe’ Charles Sopko had another claim to fame.
The free cemetery tours will be held from 6 to 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 10-11 at Union Cemetery, which is located at 89 Main St., Hellertown.
In the summer of 1972, Hellertown came together to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the borough’s incorporation with festivities many recall to this day.
