Slatington, Pennsylvania

Martha from Meandering Martha has been posting "monochrome" pictures. Some of them are simply inspired!

I saw this black and white picture in a book called "Alco's to Allentown" by Thomas A. Biery and found it rather haunting. Its really amazing what you can do with black and white. I'm going to try getting some B&W shots with my camera.

In 1737, Nicholas Kern was the first white settler in what would become Slatington. Kern established a sawmill shortly after arriving. In 1756, Benjamin Franklin wrote that he had procured boards and timber from Kern's sawmill. In the 19th century two Welshman, who recognized its properties and importance from being used in Europe, discovered slate. A quarry was set up in 1845, and, in 1847, a factory was erected. In 1846, Slatington was incorporated into a Borough of Pennsylvania.


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Built in 1862, a year before Lincoln's Gettysburg address, Slatington's Lehigh Valley Railroad station was one of the oldest structures on the original section of the railroad built between Easton and Jim Thorpe.

The Lehigh Valley Railroad later ran from Oak Island, New Jersey (in the Meadowlands across the Hudson River from New York City) an Buffalo, New York via Towanda, PA and with a secondary line that ran through Monroeton, PA.

The sign reads 109.5 miles to New York City on left end and 338.1 miles to Buffalo, New York on the other end.

The station was destroyed by a high-speed freight train derailment on February 1, 1969. An old no-longer-used 6 inch water main used to supply steam trains with water burst in the basement of the station from the force of the impact of 31 freight cars scattering across the countryside - some of them going by way of the station's front door.

Otto Orkin, founder of Orkin pest-control is probably the best known native Slatingtonian.

Additional information about Slatington can be found here