Welcome to the Lehigh Valley Landmarks with Leon podcast series, celebrating 250 years of independence. I'm your host, Rachel Leon. Since being elected in 2022 and serving as Vice President of Bethlehem City Council, I'm humbled by the opportunity to serve the diverse communities that make up our great city. But to understand where we're going, we need to understand our past. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story about the 250 years that made the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, known as the Christmas City, as we explore historic landmarks.
Although the battles of the Revolutionary War never reached Bethlehem’s soil, the Continental Army sure did.
From December of 1776 to March of 1777, the Moravian Second Single Brethren’s House experienced its first bout as a military hospital, housing sick and wounded soldiers in the Continental Army. In this time, “the Brethren made coffins for and buried 110 unnamed individuals, said to be primarily Virginians and Marylanders, in the winter of 1776-1777,” as documented by John Ettwien, a Moravian of the Revolutionary War period.
After the Battle of Brandywine in the fall of 1777, the Army evacuated Philadelphia and travelled back to the Lehigh Valley with hundreds of wounded and sick soldiers among them. By the end of December 1777, 700 men were being treated at the Brethren’s House, which was only meant to fit 200. Illness was also rampant in the hospital.
In the winter of 1777-1778, the soldiers of the hospital guard buried approximately four hundred dead in trenches adjacent to the burial site of those who had perished in the previous winter.
In 1931, The Daughters of the American Revolution dedicated a crypt in the location of these burials, naming the memorial “The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” The crypt is located on First Avenue near West Market Street. The memorial reads, “Within this crypt rest the bones of an Unknown Soldier in the War for Independence. He was one of more than 500 men who died in the Continental Hospital here in Bethlehem and were buried on this hillside.”
Imagine the surprise of the construction crew who, in February of 1995, happened upon the remains of one of these 500 men while working on a residential site in the area.
Archaeologists Mark Shaffer and Dorothy Humpf uncovered the remains of three individuals, all of whom were young male Continental Army soldiers who died in the nearby hospital.
There was no evidence of traumatic injuries on any of the three individuals, so Dr. Humph believed it highly likely that they died from an epidemic disease, much like most of the soldiers buried in Bethlehem.
The archaeologists also discovered fragments of decomposed coffin wood, coffin nails, and a button. Since the recovered bodies had been in coffins, they were likely buried in the winter of 1776-1777.
On Memorial Day weekend of 1996, members of the “The Old Guard,” who preside over the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, the City of Bethlehem, local historical organizations and veteran groups, held a re-internment ceremony.
Today, archaeologists suspect that the size of the burial ground could be larger than one acre, with Route 378 acting as its eastern boundary.
Bethlehem’s place in American history extends beyond the Moravian settlement and the steel—the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier demonstrates the part that Bethlehem played in the American Revolution.
We want to give a special thanks to Jordan Knox, an undergraduate student studying English and Environmental Studies at Lehigh University for her writing contribution for this episode.
