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Pennsylvania Counties

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Pennsylvania Counties

There are sixty-seven counties of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States of America. The city of Philadelphia is coterminous with Philadelphia County, and governmental functions have been consolidated since 1854.

Lehigh County, Pennsylvania

Lehigh County History, Geography, Demographics, Cities and Towns, and Education

County Seat: Allentown
Year Organized: 1812
Square Miles: 347

Court House:

17 South Seventh Street
County Courthouse
Allentown, PA 18101-2400

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named for the Lehigh River. The name Lehigh is derived from the German "Lecha," which comes from the Native American term "Uchauwekink," meaning, "where there are forks."

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

County History

Created on March 6, 1812, from part of Northampton County and named for the Lehigh River. The name Lehigh is derived from the German "Lecha," which comes from the Native American term "Uchauwekink," meaning, "where there are forks." Allentown, the county seat, was laid out about 1762 and named for Chief Justice William Allen of Pennsylvania, a local landowner. It was incorporated as the Borough of Northampton on March 18, 1811, renamed Allentown in 1838, and chartered as a city on March 12, 1867. The county adopted a home rule charter in November 1975.

Although English, Scotch-Irish, and Welsh were in the Saucon Township area before 1729, large numbers of Swiss and Germans came to the Lehigh Valley after that. Philadelphians allied with the Penn proprietors received large grants and sold them to settlers. Allentown was designed to take advantage of the road to Reading. Canal development in the 1820s preceded the growth of industry. Railroads arrived in the 1840s, and Allentown grew large in the 1850s. Small iron furnaces using local ore flourished until phased out by competition elsewhere. By the late nineteenth century the slate industry, grain milling, and the manufacture of shoes, cotton, woolens, silk, cigars, beer, and cement were major enterprises, but each has been overcome by competitors elsewhere since the 1930s. Machinery manufacture was dominant until the deindustrialization period of the 1970s. Forty-three percent of the land is farmed, and the value of harvested crops exceeds that of animal products. Lehigh is in the top quarter of the counties in total farm income.

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 348 square miles (902 km²), of which, 347 square miles (898 km²) of it is land and 2 square miles (4 km²) of it (0.48%) is water.

The county is located within the Lehigh Valley, a geographic region bounded by Blue Mountain, a ridge of the Appalachian mountain range which varies from 1,000 to 1,585 feet (483 m) in height in the north of the county, and South Mountain, a ridge of 500 to 1,000 feet (300 m) in height in the south of the county. The highest point in the county is Bake Oven Knob, a mass of Tuscarora conglomeratic rocks that rises about 100 feet above the main ridge of the Blue Mountain in northwestern Heidelberg Township.

Lehigh County is in the Delaware River watershed. While most of the county is drained by the Lehigh River and its tributaries, the Schuylkill River also drains regions in the south of the county via the Perkiomen Creek and the northwest via the Maiden Creek.

Neighboring Counties:

Carbon County to the north
Northampton County to the northeast and east
Bucks County to the southeast
Montgomery County to the south
Berks County and Schuylkill County to the west.

Cities and Towns:

- Alburtis	borough	Incorporated Area
- Allentown (County Seat)	city	Incorporated Area
- Bethlehem	city	Incorporated Area
- Catasauqua	borough	Incorporated Area
- Coopersburg	borough	Incorporated Area
- Coplay	borough	Incorporated Area
- Emmaus	borough	Incorporated Area
- Lower Macungie	township
- Lower Milford	township
- Lowhill	township
- Macungie	borough	Incorporated Area
- North Whitehall	township
- Slatington	borough	Incorporated Area
- South Whitehall	township
- Upper Macungie	township
- Upper Milford	township
- Upper Saucon	township
- Weisenberg	township
- Whitehall	borough	Incorporated Area

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resources

The history of our nation was a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names given the counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the "characteristic features of this country!"

But age, size and colorful names of our counties isn't the only reason to explore counties' role in American history, or the history of county government itself. In fact, the story of county government reflects the larger meanings of American history.

Today's counties are the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the US. They are the most diverse, varying in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they express a 1990's political slogan "Think globally, act locally."