Established 1904 Curator Jill Youngken, M.A. Type of business Historical/Museum | Director Joseph Garrera, M.A. Founded 1904 | |
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Location 432 West Walnut Street
Allentown, Pennsylvania 18102 Headquarters Allentown, Pennsylvania, United States Similar Baum School of Art, Allentown Art Museum, Historical Society of Berks Co, Burnside Plantation, State Theatre | ||
Lehigh County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1904, dedicated to collecting, preserving, and exhibiting the history of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania and the Lehigh Valley. The Historical Society and Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum are located at 432 West Walnut Street in Allentown.
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Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum
The Lehigh County Historical Society is headquartered in the Lehigh Valley Heritage Museum, a state-of-the-art 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m2) museum facility with four galleries and more than 10,000 square feet (930 m2) of exhibition space. Recent exhibits have included exhibits on the Civil War, on Pennsylvania Germans, and its current exhibit on the American Revolution. The Museum maintains an extensive collection of local and regional historical materials, with more than 35,000 historical artifacts in its collection.
Scott Andrew Trexler II Research Library & Archive
The Lehigh County Historical Society's library, the Scott Andrew Trexler II Research Library and Archive, houses 70,000 vintage photographs and nearly three million historical documents. Included in its collections are more than 800 volumes of church and cemetery records for Lehigh and neighboring counties, early county records (tax rolls, wills and land deeds), indexed marriage records and announcements, 800 volumes of family genealogical histories, city directories (1860 onwards), maps, census records and published histories. The library also maintains microfiche versions of many of Allentown's early German and English-language newspapers. Access to the library is free for Society members; a small fee applies for non-members.
Historic Sites
The Lehigh County Historical Society administers several historical sites in the region:
Publications
Proceedings, the journal of the Lehigh County Historical Society, was published on a bi-annual basis since 1906 and featured articles focusing on local and regional history. From 1947 to 1994, the publication was bound in a distinctive blue buckram hardcover binding with gilt lettering. In 1994, the journal was published in softcover. Publication of Proceedings was discontinued in 2004.