Community Corner

Historic Bethlehem Partnership Unveils 10.9 Mile Heritage Trail

80-stop tour will tell visitors and residents about city's rich and diverse history.

The Historic Bethlehem Partnership this week unveiled a new 10.9-mile long, walking Heritage Trail designed to tell the city’s rich history, from its colonial Moravian founding to its emergence as an industrial powerhouse during the height of the Bethlehem Steel Corp.

At each of a mind-boggling 80 trail stops along the way, residents and visitors alike will be able to hear a description of the place they are visiting and its significance in an audio clip available by Internet download to MP3 players or smartphones.

Each of the stops will be marked with a blue numbered sign.

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It will cost a one-time $12 fee to download the descriptions of all 80 locations. Visitors who do not own the technology can, for $12, rent digital recorders or iPod Nanos with preloaded content at the at 505 Main St.

“Today we are celebrating the wealth of history in our community by unveiling an 80-stop heritage trail, which winds its way through North, South and West sides of Bethlehem, tying together the evolution of our town from a small Moravian enclave to one of the best 100 communities in which to live today,” said Charlene Donchez Mowers, the partnership’s president and the author of the trail’s presented content.

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To put the number of trail stops in perspective, Donchez Mowers compared Bethlehem to Boston’s Freedom Trail, which has 16 stops and Philadelphia’s Constitution Trail, which has 20.

The Bethlehem Heritage Trail includes two stops that are registered National Historic Landmarks: the 1742 Gemeinhaus, the largest 18th century log structure still in continuous use in the United States; and the 1762 Waterworks, the first pumped municipal water system in America.

It also includes the , the farm in the city, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and six nationally registered historic districts.

The news conference in which the new heritage trail was announced was held amid the ruins and preserved structures of the picturesque Colonial Industrial Quarter, which sits along the Monocacy Creek just a few feet west of historic Main Street.

“Here we stand in the middle of America’s earliest industrial park where there was the largest concentration of pre-Industrial Revolution crafts, trades and industries -- 35 different operations within five years of founding Bethlehem,” Donchez Mowers said. “That’s just amazing.”

“I don’t know of another community in the United States that can tell the story of industry like the city of Bethlehem,” said Mayor John Callahan.

“What this trail is about is not just the bricks and the mortar, it’s about the people who worked here and the lives that were changed and the role that Bethlehem has played, not just in the region, but in this country and in the world. This is a very unique opportunity for our community to tell that story.”

In all, the trail has six sections or “links” as Donchez Mowers called them: the Moravian Founders, the Monocacy Valley, Westward Expansion, Victorian Bethlehem, “Farmlands to Industry” and Bethlehem Steel.

The new trail not only provides a new attraction for tourists and visitors, but an opportunity to encourage residents to exercise. Highmark Blue Shield, a health insurer, is the presenting sponsor of the attraction.

"You can walk, jog, hike or bike," Donchez Mowers said. "We want to encourage everyone to enjoy our beautiful, walkable city. We want you to get off of the couch, out of the house and listen to the fabulous stories of our city."


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