In September 1777, as British forces advanced on Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania authorities ordered the city’s public bells removed for safekeeping. Officials feared that, if captured, the bronze bells could be melted down for British military use. The State House bell—later known as the Liberty Bell—was among eleven bells taken from Philadelphia.
On September 18, 1777, the guarded wagon convoy carrying the State House bell stopped overnight in what is now Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The bells traveled by horse-drawn wagon from Philadelphia through the Lehigh Valley, passing through Bethlehem before continuing to Northampton Town, now Allentown.
Later that month, the State House bell was brought to Zion’s Reformed Church in Allentown and hidden beneath the church floorboards. It remained there from September 1777 until June 1778, when the British withdrew from Philadelphia and the bell could safely return.
The episode helped preserve an object that, in later generations, became one of the nation’s most enduring symbols of freedom.
Image: Photo of the basement of Zion’s Reformed Church in Allentown, PA with a replica of the Liberty Bell, 1962 via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
