Hellertown: Palatine Brothers on the Saucon

Hellertown, along Saucon Creek just south of Bethlehem, takes its name from a father and son who crossed the Atlantic from the Rhineland in seventeen thirty-eight. Christopher Heller and his son Simon arrived aboard the ship Winter Galley out of Rotterdam on September fifth of that year, acquired about one hundred seventy-six acres near Lehigh Mountain, and established the settlement that would bear their name. For generations it remained a quiet village; by eighteen twenty there were just thirteen houses and seventy-three inhabitants, with a mill pressing linseed oil.

Then the iron age arrived. The Saucon Iron Company organized in eighteen sixty-six, bringing new furnaces and new workers to the creek valley. By then Hellertown had begun the transformation from Palatine farm village to industrial borough that defines it today.