What's New?
Note: starting in December, we are holding our monthly lectures on the 2nd Sunday of the month at 2:00 pm.
New Bus Tours!
On April 4th, 2009, we launched the third of our ethnic heritage books: At the Blue Hills Above the Forks: Pennsylvania Dutch Culture in Northampton County’s Slate Belt by author Melissa E. Hough.
It is available for sale at the Heritage Center, Merchants Bank, and Chocolates on Broadway.
Monthly Lecture Series
Summer lectures are the 2nd Thursday of the month from April to November at 7:00 pm.
Winter lectures are the 2nd Sunday of the month at 2:00 pm.
Check the schedule often as lectures may change.
Upcoming lectures feature:
NOTE: The Feb. (2/14) and Mar. (3/14) lectures have been cancelled due to circumstances beyond our control. Please check back to see when they may be rescheduled.
Apr. 15th, John Reinhart
The Welsh of the Slate Belt
May 10th, Cheryl Statham
Preserving Food our Great Grandparents Way
Jun. 10th, Mike Piersa
Topic on Slate
Current Collections
Our collections are constantly changing. The next collections include:
Dec. 7th - Mar. 28th
Toys of Christmas Past
Mar. 28th - Jul. 31th
Welsh Display
See Photo Gallery of Past Exhibits
The Slate Industry Room
The Slate Room exhibits many types of slate products from the last 150 years; some of them were made for this building, which was constructed during the golden age of slate manufacturing. Slate has been used as a roofing material in Europe for a thousand years. In the mid-nineteenth century, it became popular in America. There are individual shingles on display from both the Slate Belt and international quarries. Visitors can look out the window of the Heritage Center and see especially good examples of roofing slate on the former Eisenhart’s drugstore building located on the corner of First and Market streets. The curved, graduated shingles on the cupola, built around 1890, are from William Blake’s Quarry near Roseto.
Visitors can see excellent examples of decorative, marbleized slate in the fireplace mantles in adjacent rooms made for this building around 1907, most likely by the Keenan structural slate mills in Bangor. A slate mantle can be found in the Welsh Room which formerly was the fire company meeting room. In 1908, mantles such as this were given as prizes during a local Four County Firemen’s Parade. The alarm room and restroom near the Slate Room have examples of structural slate that are also original to the building. “Structural slate” consisted of polished but undecorated slabs of slate used for variety of functional objects. The floor of the Slate Room is made of contemporary slate tiles that were donated to the Heritage Center by Dally’s Quarry in Pen Argyl.