Glendon, Pennsylvania, A Town Built Around a Furnace
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
Glendon is one of those places that exists entirely because of a single industrial decision. Before eighteen forty-four it was farmland along the Lehigh River in Northampton County. That year a Boston businessman named Charles Jackson commissioned an experimental iron furnace here, designed by the ironmaster William Firmstone, who gave the works the Scottish name Glendon.
When the hot-blast furnace was lit on March fifteenth of eighteen forty-four, the place came alive overnight. Workers arrived, housing went up, a whole company town took shape around the stack. By eighteen sixty-seven enough people lived here, one hundred forty-one in all, that the community incorporated as a borough.
When the iron works became unprofitable in the middle eighteen nineties and shut down, Glendon had nowhere to grow. It remains today one of the smallest boroughs in Pennsylvania, a quiet pocket of row houses by the river with almost nothing to mark what it once was.
