Photo by Virginia Lawrence-Hope)(Photo by Richard F. Hope

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(Photo by Virginia Lawrence-Hope)(Photo by Richard F. Hope)

Centre Square

A tour of Centre Square in Easton, Pennsylvania should logically begin with the Square itself.

The town was founded in 1752 by Thomas Penn (son of William Penn, the great proprietor of the Pennsylvania colony). Penn had his agent and surveyor, William Parsons, design the town as a grid of streets around a “Great Square” to be formed at the town center.[1] The new town was named “Easton” after the English estate of Easton-Neston in Northamptonshire owned by Thomas Penn’s father-in-law, Lord Pomfret.[2] Early street names also drew from Thomas Penn’s family and acquaintance: Fermor (now 2nd) Street from his in-laws’ family name; Pomfret (now 3rd) Street from Lord Pomfret’s title; Hamilton (now 4th) Street from his Lt. Governor; Juliana (now 5th) Street from his wife’s first name. In September 1752 there were three houses. Over that winter, Easton grew to include only 11 families.[3]

One of the first things constructed when the town were apparentlya pillory and whipping post, which were located at the southern end of the “Great Square”, about 50 feet South of the eventual location of the Courthouse, in the center of South Pomfret (later 3rd) Street.[4] The Sheriff’s fee for whipping a criminal was 15 shillings.[5] Useof the pillory and whipping post was legally abolished in Pennsylvania in 1790; imprisonment at hard labor was the substituted punishment.[6] One early settler, Ernst Becker (a baker who had immigrated from what is now Germany), later told his grandson (George Troxell) that when he arrived there were only three houses and no rooms available in the “town”, so he pitched a tent on the public square under a tree. In order to open a bakery, he obtained flour from a mill in Bethlehem, which (because no road was open) he had to obtain by walking along the Indian path, carrying a bag. He later built a house in Hamilton Street, and was still alive in 1785.[7]

Just two years after Easton was founded, the French and Indian War began near modern-day Pittsburgh. Indian attacks swept the Pennsylvania frontier. Beginning in 1756, a series of peace conferences were held in Easton by the Governor of Pennsylvania and other colonial officials, with the various Indian tribes. At that time, Easton was a village of about 150 settlers,[8] consistingof “one school, a jail, several taverns and between fifteen and twenty dwellings . . . with most of the lots still covered with trees and underbrush”.[9] These Indian Conferences culminated in the Treaty of Easton of 1758. The formal treaty negotiations were conducted in the “Great Square” (now Centre Square). Because the new town had no building large enough to accommodate the participants, speakers stood in an open shed constructed in the Great Square, which at least allowed the principals to be under cover from the rain.[10] The scene was colorful. On one side sat colonial governors and a royal agent, with their secretaries, advisors, and soldiers wearing bright red coats. On the other side gathered more than 500 members of a dozen Indian nations, with their chiefs in front and warriors behind, and women and children in the periphery even farther back.[11] Between all were the interpreters, to handle the cacophony of languages and cultural differences represented by the collection of English, German, Scots-Irish, Iroquois, Delaware, Shawnee, and other nationalities present.[12]

The 1758 Treaty of Easton suspended the Indian hostilities in Pennsylvania, and made possible British General Forbes’ eviction of the French from the Pittsburgh area (thus solving the original issue of the War). It also marked the turning point of British fortunes in North America during the War, which ultimately placed all of Canada in British hands. Unfortunately, the Treaty of Easton also formed the basis for the troubles between the London government and the American colonists – troubles that just 17 years later blossomed into the American Revolution.

• The Treaty promised to stop colonial settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains, and leave that land to the Indians. The British government implemented this promise with its royal Proclamation of 1763, and left its military garrisons in place at the frontier to enforce the Proclamation and deter Indian attacks. It funded these troops with the infamous Stamp Act of 1765 – raising a firestorm of protest in the colonies.
• Despite the garrisons, colonial frontiersmen poured through the mountains into Indian lands. London backed down by rescinding the Stamp Act, negotiating with the Iroquois to allow colonial settlement, and maintaining only token taxes to preserve its authority, while withdrawing the troops to the coast (ostensibly as an “economy measure”) to overawe the colonists.
• Meanwhile, to settle the land issues, London passed the Quebec Act of 1774, which moved the Ohio country to Canadian jurisdiction. This, however, brought the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania (which had large economic interests in their claims to the western lands) to the brink of rebellion. The continuing tax revolt issues in Boston, together with the British military response, completed the progress to armed rebellion.[13]

Before the Revolution itself, in 1765-66, the Courthouse for Northampton County was constructed in the Great Square.[14] The property was formally secured from the Penn Family in a patent dated 28 September 1764,[15] at an annual ground rent (in kind or currency equivalent) of at an annual quit rent of one red rose payable on 1 March of each year;[16] the “Great Square” was surveyed to measure 80 feet square.[17] The building used the same plan (on a somewhat smaller and less elaborate scale) as the historic Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia – but Easton’s version was erected half a decade earlier.[18] “In plan it was a Greek cross, the roof forming gables at the ends of each arm. A well designed cupola or belfry capped the structure.”[19] George Taylor (who would later sign the Declaration of Independence) was in charge of the funds for constructing the building.[20] Two years after the Courthouse was opened, a bell was cast for it by Mathias Tommerop in the Moravians’s foundry in Bethlehem. It was delivered for placement in the Courthouse cupola in Easton by Moravian Brother Arbo. “[A]s the first peal of the bell sounded from the belfry, Brother Arbo . . . received his money” and “returned to Bethlehem rejoicing.”[21]

The Revolution

Notwithstanding the elegant courthouse, Easton was still regarded as a frontier backwater in the 1770s. In 1771 it was labeled “a dog hole of a place, remote from all the world”;[22] a contemptuous British officer visiting Easton in 1779 complained that the town contained only “three elegant buildings . . . and about as many inhabitants that are any ways agreeable. Take them in general they are a very inhospitable set – all high Dutch and Jew”.[23]

Nevertheless, the backwater town came to occupy an important place in the colonies’ war for independence. On 8 July 1776, Robert Levers (the official who administered Northampton County for the new Revolutionary government, and de factor “local dictator”) read the new Declaration of Independence from the steps of the Easton Courthouse. Easton was one of only three places who reported to the central authorities in Philadelphia that they had held a public reading as of that date – the other two being Philadelphia itself, and Trenton, N.J.[24] The Easton Courthouse bell was rung for the occasion. Now known as the “Northampton County Liberty Bell”, it is today displayed at the Northampton County Government Center on Seventh Street.[25]

At the reading of the Declaration, a “standard” was also displayed. Local tradition holds that this “standard” was the Easton Flag, which is currently displayed at the Easton Area Public Library on Sixth and Church Streets.[26] If authentic, this flag pre-dated Betsy Ross’s flag, and may be the oldest existing “stars and stripes”.[27] The Easton Flag’s design reverses the modern pattern by putting the thirteen red and white stripes in the upper left corner, while the blue field occupies the main portion of the flag. The circled stars are eight-pointed.[28]

Easton became a center of supply for Washington’s army during the Revolution. When the British occupied Philadelphia or southern New Jersey and the road North from Nazareth rendered “extremely unsafe” by “the excursions of the Indians”,[29]virtually all traffic between the northern and southern colonies had to pass over the Delaware River ferry at Easton. The town saw many important Revolutionary leaders pass through it, along with Washington’s military supplies.[30] It was also the largest repository of sick and wounded soldiers in the area during the early part of the war. It appears that Easton housed more sick and wounded Continental troops in 1776-77, than any other town in the Lehigh Valley, including the much more celebrated hospital facilities in Bethlehem. Indeed, the number of soldiers in the hospital may have exceeded the total peacetime population of the town. In addition, Easton housed a large number of British and Hessian prisoners of war, some of them sick and wounded, although these invalids may have been kept at the site of their incarceration, or in the town jail on South 3rd Street. Many of the sick and wounded died, not least from epidemic infections of smallpox and typhus exacerbated by the poor conditions under which the men were kept.[31]

A Family Revolution

On 26 July 1782 – the summer after General Washington’s decisive victory at Yorktown – a ball was given in the Easton Courthouse in the General’s honor by Meyer (also spelled Myer) Hart, an original Easton settler in 1752 who became the town’s wealthiest merchant,[32] and was an ancestor of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo.[33]

• Among other things, Hart contributed nails to help build the first schoolhouse in Easton, located behind what is now the German Reformed Church on North Third Street. Because Hart was Jewish, that Church later honored his memory with a Star of David inscribed on a stained glass window still visible today.[34]

At his victory ball, Hart presented his family to the General and his staff. Some months later, he was outraged to find his 20-year-old daughter Judith pregnant, and (perhaps worse) subject to a rumor that she had secretly been married at the ball by anArmy Chaplain to Lt. James Pettigrew, a newly retired Army officer and a Christian. In the resulting family tempest, Hart threw his daughter out of the house. He was only reconciled when a settlement was brokered by the girl’s Uncle (by marriage), Mordecai Moses Mordecai from Philadelphia. Uncle Mordecai had studied Jewish law in his native Lithuania, and had attended Hart’s fateful ball in Easton. Under the brokered settlement, Uncle Mordecai (as a rabbi) performed a Jewish marriage, and the young couple agreed that their daughters (of whom there were ultimately three) were to be raised as Jews, although the sons (of whom there were ultimately four) could be raised as Christians.[35] One of their sons, Samuel Pettigrew, later became the Mayor of Pittsburg[36] from 1832 until 1836.[37]

For his role in performing the inter-faith marriage, Uncle Mordecai was prosecuted by the Jewish authorities in Philadelphia – but he protested his conviction, ignored the Philadelphia tribunal’s judgment, and continued to perform weddings anyway.[38] When Judith Pettigrew died in 1844 (62 years after her marriage), she had to beburiedin a special part of the Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia, because of her Christian husband.[39]

The American Republic

By 1890, the national Census showed Easton’s population to have grown to about 600 inhabitants.[40] In 1789, Easton was chartered as a borough. The charter called for markets in the Great Square twice a week. An implementing public ordinance was passed two years later formally establishing the public Farmers’ Market,[41]which may have already been conducted there as a practical matter, possibly since the town’s founding. The charter also called for a fair twice a year, but this was discontinued in 1828.[42] The Farmers’ Market still meets in Centre Square each week in the summertime to this day,[43] despite the opinion of Easton’s mayor in the 1930s that it was “archaic” and his call that “it be eliminated”.[44] The Easton Farmers’ Market’s promoters have claimed in recent years that it is the “Oldest, Continuous Open-Air Farmers’ Market in the United States”.[45] In 1794, a visitor to Easton noted that “the facilities for shipping provisions from here to Philadelphia, by the Delaware river, bring here the produce of the neighborhood, especially in winter, when there is snow”.[46] Based on a visitor’s writings three years later (as well as other writings), historians have concluded that Easton was then “the market place for great sections of eastern Pennsylvania and western Jersey. Here grain was brought to be ground and shipped. Here the manufactured goods of America and Europe were brought on Durham boats, poled up the Delaware from Philadelphia. So the sturdy farmers sold their grain to Mordecai Piersal or others of his trade, and bought with the proceeds such tools, clothing or trinkets as met their needs or fancies.”[47] Rev. Condit in the 1880s recalled that Easton became the produce market for “nearly half the State”, including not only the Delaware and Lehigh River valleys, but also the farms along the North and West branches of the Susquehanna River as well.[48]

In addition to the market, pigs were allowed to wallow in a rainwater pond that formed in the Square after storms, while as many as 200 sheep grazed in the shade of the Courthouse, moving slowly around the building as the sun progressed across the sky. Cattle were also allowed to roam through the Square. “The stench at times was intolerable.”[49] In 1803, a public meeting voted to forbid horses from running at large in the Great Square, but a motion to exclude the pigs apparently failed, and no attempt was made to exclude the sheep.[50]

An open-sided Market House was authorized by an ordinance passed in 1796,[51] and completedin approximately 1801[52]in the Square immediately North of the Court House.[53] At that time, Easton “was the depot or market place for all the country within a residue of seventy-five miles. . . . Scranton, Wilkesbarre, Stroudsburg and other distant towns purchase[d] all their goods here, and it was a common thing to see Northampton Street literally lined with all kinds of vehicles over night.”[54] Historian Mathew S. Henry, writing in 1851, opined that “Easton is now undoubtedly the wealthiest town (comparatively to its population) in the State.”[55] A later summary explained: “Easton was unparalleled in the State as a grain market and forwarding point for the produce of the entire northeastern part of Pennsylvania as well as northwestern New Jersey.” As many as 500 wagons and sleds a day carrying grain came to Easton or the surrounding Bushkill mills, representing some 15,000 – 20,000 bushels of grain per day. As mills grew up to process this grain, by about 1830 about 200,000 barrels of wheat, rye-flour and cornmeal were shipped through Easton, not counting the rye and corn that was made into whisky.[56]

Courthouse & SE Quadrant of Centre Square

(Black & White Engraving drawn from a Water Color by Mary Elizabeth Maxwell – later Mrs. Washington McCartney, c.1835)[57]

Another of Mrs. McCartney’s water colors, from a vantage point slightly to the left showing the SE corner, is reproduced with the separate article for 1 Centre Square. Yet another of her views of Centre Square from the other direction, showing the NE corner, is reproduced with the separate for 62 Centre Square. Yet another view, from North 3rd Street, more clearly shows the Market House.

Market House and Courthouse, Centre Square (looking South, c.1840)

(Black & White rendering from Water Color by Mary Elizabeth Maxwell – later Mrs. Washington McCartney, c.1835)[58]

In the late 1840s, the Great Square acquired its modern informal designation as “The Circle” as the result of a governmental dispute. At that time, as noted above,the Northampton County Courthouse occupied an 80’ square piece of ground which the Penns had provided for the purpose. The roadway, however, was under the authority of the Easton Borough. The Borough had customarily held town meetings in the County Courthouse, and had also arranged for space in the separate County Records Building[59] for a volunteer fire company, but paid no rent. In 1846, the County ordered the town’s fire company to vacate the space in the Records Building. In retaliation, the Borough’s Town Council approved building plans on 28 July 1848[60] – and built, in the following year –a circular spite fence that surrounded the square Courthouse, which established the form of the modern roadway in “The Circle”.[61] This fencing effort came as part of a general program of improvement in the Square, in which the roadway was “m’cadamized”. That building program was also to have torn down the Market House,[62] although there is still a reference to its use in 1855.[63] The Market House appears to have been demolished by 1861, when a newspaper article recounts that farmers were again bringing their produce to town to sell. Easton Borough was encouraging them to continue bringing these goods to Centre Square to be laid out in an orderly fashion, but some were conducting their business elsewhere in town.[64]

Easton’s population had grown to about 6,000 inhabitants by 1850, and to about 9,000 by 1860.[65] In 1860-61, as the American Civil War began, the old Courthouse was replaced with a larger one located at what was then the edge of town on the Bethlehem Road (now Walnut Avenue),[66] at the corner of 7th Street (which had been recently constructed[67]). Not everyone was in sympathy with the move. Prominent Easton lawyer Andrew H. Reeder, for example, deplored the “removal of the old Court House into what he was pleased to call ‘the first corn-field on the Bethlehem road.’”[68] The old Courthouse in Centre Square was promptly demolished in 1862.[69]