William Allen Founds a Town: Northampton Towne, 1762

The man who founded this city was the most powerful lawyer in colonial Pennsylvania, and he would die on the wrong side of the American Revolution. That tension runs through everything William Allen built here.

Allen was born in Philadelphia in seventeen oh four into a family already comfortable, and he multiplied that comfort into something extraordinary. Merchant shipping, land speculation, loans to anyone who needed them. By the seventeen forties he was the wealthiest man in Pennsylvania, and he was also its Chief Justice, a position he held for two decades. When he traveled to London in seventeen sixty-three, Benjamin Franklin accompanied him on the crossing. They were friends, for a time.

In seventeen sixty-two, Allen laid out a town on his private landholdings in the Lehigh Valley. He called it Northampton Towne, a name that matched the county, and he designed it with ambition. Forty-two city blocks, seven hundred and fifty-six individual lots. The streets he named for his children: Margaret, James, Ann, John. Those names have since been replaced by numbers, but the original grid remains almost unchanged underneath the modern city.

Allen wanted Northampton Towne to be a commercial center between Philadelphia and the frontier, a place where the iron works, flour mills, and farms of the Lehigh Valley could ship goods downriver. He had the river, the land, and the capital. What he could not predict was that within fourteen years, the colony he had helped build would declare independence from the Crown he served.

Allen was a loyalist. When the Revolution came, he sided with the British. His sons fought for the Crown. He fled to England in seventeen seventy-six and never returned. He died in London in seventeen eighty, an exile. The town that bore his name outlasted its founder by centuries. It formally adopted the name Allentown in eighteen thirty-eight, after decades of popular usage had made the original designation irrelevant.