Lehigh Valley Marketplace

By Kathryn Finegan Clark

Pioneers organized what is now Upper Saucon Township. These sturdy immigrants beat back the wilderness, clearing forests and turning the rolling hills into fields.

Center Valley is aptly named. Connecting the Lehigh and Delaware valleys, it’s a direct link between eastern Pennsylvania’s great metropolitan areas, Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton and the City of Philadelphia.

And it’s been that way since the first settlers began arriving in 1732, coming mainly from Germany, England and Wales. Eleven years later the pioneers organized what is now Upper Saucon Township. These sturdy immigrants beat back the wilderness, clearing forests and turning the rolling hills into fields producing grain, gardens ripe with vegetables and orchards heavy with fruit.
The Village of Center Valley became a gathering spot for wagons headed for urban markets and the farmers traveled old dirt roads now replaced by routes 309 and 378. The village in its first hundred years or so was composed of only a general store, a hotel and a 60-acre farm. Then, in 1868, the North Pennsylvania Railroad sliced through the township and built the Center Valley Station a quarter mile east of the village along the banks of the Saucon Creek. Within six years villagers had a post office, blacksmith shop, and shoemaker as well as several newer homes.

By 1873, seven homes had cropped up near the station, and two years later the Centennial Bridge, constructed for a whopping $1,200 linked the two little towns. Within a year 18 homes, two coal yards, a store and a hotel planted themselves between the villages. Today Center Valley’s population hovers around 900 and is the site of Upper Saucon Township’s municipal offices on Camp Meeting Road.

As the railroad beat out the wagon trails, the village area closest to the station was actually known as Milktown because of the huge quantities of milk shipped to Philadelphia by rail.
Aside from farming, Upper Saucon’s only industry was zinc mining, which began in 1845 on a farm owned by Jacob Ueberroth; that is now the township’s sole registered historical site. Purchased first by Lehigh Zinc Co. and later New Jersey Zinc Co., the property now is owned by the Stabler Land Co.

If the township has been a little short on history and growth compared with other Lehigh Valley settlements, it’s making up for it now. Once just a go-through place, it’s become a go-to place.
Between 1960 and 2000, population doubled to about 12,000, and is now estimated at about 15,000, thanks partly to a housing boom in the late 1980s after I-78 cut through and Route 309 became a superhighway. Now what was once a sleepy little farming area has become a bedroom community of homes enveloped in natural beauty whose owners have to leave daily to commute to work elsewhere.

Thanks to many years of careful planning for development, Upper Saucon has become the go-to place, not only for truly luxurious homes and upscale shopping, but also for corporate headquarters such as Olympus Cameras and Lutron Electronics.

The township is home to five golf courses: the exclusive Saucon Valley and Center Valley clubs, Wedgewood, Locust Valley and Tumblebrook, a course designed by the famous Donald Roth in the 1920s.

The Stabler Center, one of the largest areas of land being developed in the Lehigh Valley, is situated in Center Valley. The Promenade Shops at Saucon Valley opened in October 2006. Its high-end shops, varied restaurants and Rave Theater draw shoppers, diners and movie-goers from both Lehigh and Delaware valleys and beyond.

Since 1965, Center Valley has been home to the sprawling campus of DeSales University. A private Catholic university, it now has about 3,000 students, half of them undergrads and the other half studying in master’s degree and professional programs offered at its sprawling 400-acre campus.

The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival takes place at DeSales every summer. The Festival was founded in 1992 as the professional outgrowth of the college’s Performing and Fine Arts Department and as an independent not-for-profit corporation. Professional artists on the university’s theater faculty and staff join with leading professionals from across the country each season to form the annual festival’s company of artists.

The company presents six professional productions each year and provides training and internship opportunities to students in the DeSales theater program. The university hosts the festival each summer at its state-of-the-art Schubert Theatre, named for the performing arts program founder, the Rev. Jerry Schubert OSFS. During this past season, the festival drew more than 33,000 patrons.
Just as the festival wound down last summer, Penn State Lehigh Valley settled into its new Center Valley campus. With a great rumble of 18-wheelers in mid-August, furniture and equipment was shuttled from the old Fogelsville campus to the new site. The Nittany Lion settled into its new home in grand style to the cheers of staff and students. T-shirts asking, “Where the heck is Fogelsville?” cropped up, too.

There’s also Strayer University at Stabler. It is one of 70 Strayer campuses offering information technology, accounting and business courses for working adults and online courses for students around the world.

The past few years have produced a new library, the completion of a community park system with walking trails and a 20-member police force to keep the growing population safe.
Finally, exclusive homes, priced form $1 million to $2 million have sprung up in the vicinity of the Saucon Valley Country Club at Weyhill Woods, which overlooks the greens. Nearby, for others with champagne tastes, are the new detached condominiums at Epernay.

This area has certainly come a long way since those first settlers arrived!