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.
In January 1777, Thomas Paine — the man who had written Common Sense less than a year earlier — sat in the First Reformed Church in Easton, Pennsylvania, and put his pen to the proceedings of a Native American treaty council. The ink was barely dry on American independence. Outside, a war was raging. Inside those four limestone walls, the fate of the western frontier hung in the balance.
The First Reformed Church was consecrated on November 17, 1776, and within months became a council chamber, a charity case, and a hospital ward. Few structures in the Lehigh Valley witnessed more of the Revolution’s chaos inside a single season.
The congregation’s roots run back to 1745, when German Reformed and Lutheran settlers at the Forks of the Delaware gathered in the wilderness before Easton itself existed.
According to church tradition, bonfires were lit atop Morgan’s Hill on the night before Sabbath services, guiding families across the river in the dark. By 1746, the Reverend Michael Schlatter had been sent from Holland to organize these scattered German Reformed congregations; the church still preserves a hand-illustrated Schlatter Bible, printed in Switzerland in 1747, in a glass case in the sanctuary.
On June 8, 1775 — with war already beginning in Massachusetts — the congregation laid the cornerstone of a permanent stone church on North Third Street, a joint project of the German Reformed and Lutheran communities. Construction pressed forward through the conflict. The church was consecrated on November 17, 1776, four months after independence was declared.
It did not remain a house of worship for long. In late January 1777, Continental Congress commissioners arrived in Easton to meet with representatives of the Six Nations — Seneca, Cayuga, and allied groups — who had traveled to the frontier town to negotiate.
The Americans needed native neutrality desperately; British forces were actively recruiting tribal allies along the frontier. Pews were cleared. The council convened inside the new stone church.
Thomas Paine served as secretary to the commissioners, and the treaty proceedings he recorded are dated February 6, 1777. Congress ultimately rejected the agreement, and most of the Six Nations remained British allies — but the council held in that unassuming church shaped the calculus of the frontier war.
The church’s role in the Revolution extended beyond diplomacy. As Continental Army casualties mounted following the Battles of Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, and Germantown, Easton’s largest buildings were pressed into service as hospitals. Straw was spread across the church floor. The smell of fresh timber gave way to the realities of a military ward. George Washington visited the wounded soldiers there during one of his stops in Easton.
Funding the original construction had required an unlikely act of interfaith generosity. Myer Hart — listed among Easton’s eleven founding families in 1752 and the town’s first Jewish resident — contributed to the church building fund. The congregation honored his memory with a stained glass window bearing the Star of David, which remains in the sanctuary today.
The church’s exterior was transformed in 1832, when architect Thomas U. Walter designed the prominent brick steeple that still rises above North Third Street. Twenty years later, Walter was appointed the fourth Architect of the United States Capitol, where he designed the cast-iron dome completed in 1866. The man who shaped Easton’s skyline helped define the nation’s most recognizable and symbolically significant landmarks in American history.
The First Reformed Church is known today as the First United Church of Christ located at 27 North Third Street in Easton, Pennsylvania. The 1776 limestone walls are original; the stucco was sandblasted from the exterior in 1966 to reveal the stone beneath.
The Schlatter Bible, the Penn Deed for the church land, and the stained glass honoring Myer Hart remain inside.
Information for this episode was provided by the First United Church of Christ of Easton (firstucceaston.org), the City of Easton historical records (easton-pa.com), the Continental Congress treaty proceedings of 1777 held at the Newberry Library, and the Exhibits at Lafayette College.
