The Liberty Bell Comes to Allentown: September 1777

September of seventeen seventy-seven was a dangerous month to be in Philadelphia. The British had just defeated George Washington at Brandywine Creek, and the city was about to fall. The Continental Congress fled. And someone had to decide what to do about the bells.

Patriots feared that if the British took Philadelphia, they would melt the city's bells into cannons and bullets. The State House Bell, the one we now call the Liberty Bell, and the city's other major bells were loaded onto wagons bound for safekeeping in the Pennsylvania interior. They traveled north out of the city in a wagon train, by way of Bethlehem and into the Lehigh Valley.

The convoy arrived in Allentown in late September. The chosen hiding place was Zion's Reformed Church, a congregation on Hamilton Street that was then under the care of its German-speaking congregation. The bells were unloaded and hidden under the floorboards of the church, packed beneath the wooden planks where a British patrol would be unlikely to look.

The Liberty Bell remained there for nine months. It rested under those boards from September of seventeen seventy-seven until June of seventeen seventy-eight, when the British evacuation of Philadelphia made it safe to bring the bell home. A wagon carried it back south, where it was returned to the State House steeple and hung once more.

The church and the museum that once marked the story have changed over the years. What has not changed is the story: this is the town where the bell waited out the British occupation, hidden in the dark beneath a church floor, while the Revolution continued elsewhere.