Historic Walking Tours

These Walking Tours started as one walking tour of the Mansion District created for the attendees of the Pennsylvania Canal Society visit to the Lehigh Canal in 2011.  As a project for the 100 yr Anniversary of 1914’s Old Home Week, the tour information was divided into blocks and put on the web, where it could be accessed using QR codes on signs.  Those signs have since faded beyond use and were transferred to this website upon the merger of HCPA’s webpages with the Borough of Catasauqua webpages.  Since then, the tours have expanded to other residential area of town and the industrial corridor along Front St.  Where possible, links have been inserted to original documents, such as those available through the Hopkin Thomas Website, rather than duplicating the document in this url space.

New tours are added – block by block – and existing tours are edited to reflect the results of ongoing research. The original sources of information were the history texts.  New sources include town directories (from library microfiche) and newspaper clippings from private collectors and the internet (ie newspapers.com) –  more information cecomes available on the internet every day.  Deed records were accessed at the Lehigh County Courthouse, dating back to the formation of Lehigh County.  Some earlier deeds from when this area was part of Northampton County are available in Easton, but have not been included in this research.

Historical photos are primarily from HCPA’s archives of slides left to us by Tony Imhoff, a local historian. These were digitized photographically by Robert LeFevre, a member of HCPA, and creator of the Biery House Art Gallery.  Current photos were taken primarily by Debra Mellish, the editor/author of these history pages.

The map sections came from two sources.  Ray Smicker, owner of Silver Images and past president of HCPA (now deceased) created high resolution images of the 1872 and 1876 maps of Catasauqua.  The Sanborn map sections were extracted from maps on the Pennsylvania State Archives website.  The entire Sanborn map can also be accessed through links on the Resources pages.  Other maps sections came from maps made available through The Hopkin Thomas Project website and other free internet sources.