Trout Hall: The Oldest House in Allentown

On a quiet residential block a few streets from downtown stands one of the oldest buildings in Allentown, and it belongs to a man who never finished deciding which side of history he was on. Trout Hall was built between seventeen sixty-eight and seventeen seventy by James Allen, son of the founder, on land his father deeded him in seventeen sixty-seven.

James Allen was well-educated and contradictory. He had studied at the College of Philadelphia and read law in London. He came back to Pennsylvania with ambitions for a life in both law and leisure. He chose to build his summer house here, in the hills above Northampton Towne, naming it Trout Hall after the abundance of brook trout in the surrounding creeks and the Lehigh River below.

The house is Georgian in style, two and a half stories of local stone, built to last and to impress. In the quiet years before the Revolution, it served as a summer retreat from the heat and noise of Philadelphia. James Allen kept a diary, and in its pages he recorded both his love of the countryside here and his deepening uncertainty about the political storm approaching.

He was caught between worlds. His father was a loyalist. Many of his friends were patriots. James Allen actually served briefly in a Pennsylvania militia unit early in the Revolution, one of the few loyalists to do so. He died in seventeen seventy-eight before the war ended, never having fully committed either way.

Trout Hall survived everything. The Lehigh County Historical Society operates it today as a house museum. It sits on the National Register of Historic Places as a rare surviving example of pre-Revolutionary Georgian domestic architecture in the Lehigh Valley. When you stand in front of it, you are looking at a house that was already close to twenty years old when the Constitution was ratified.