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Health & Fitness

Barns of Macungie Township

The Lower Macungie Township Historical Society recently published a new booklet. All you fans of barns (we know there are lots of you) will enjoy reading Greg Huber's comparison of the barns that were here at the end of the 1700s with the ones we have today.
None of the eighteenth-century barns are still standing in Lower Macungie, and we can't even tell how many there were when the Federal Direct Tax assessment was made in 1798 because Lower and Upper Macungie were one township then. For certain there were over 200, most of them built partly or entirely of logs, in the old Macungie Township. All the barns we see today, with a couple of twentieth-century exceptions, were built during the nineteenth century of stone, brick, wood, and combinations of various materials. Plenty of black and white and color photographs are used in the booklet to show features of the barns standing today.
Greg uses statistics and descriptions about the types of barns seen today in both Lower Macungie and in Upper Macungie. He has found 123 barns in LMT (including Macungie and Alburtis), and 89 in UMT. Many others have been torn down in the past few decades for a variety of reasons, one of which is the expense of keeping a good roof on them.
Next time you are in the Lower Macungie Library, go to the Local History and Genealogy section and have a look for the booklet. We won't sell you a copy, but if you join the LMT historical society we'll give you one.

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