Coplay celebrates 150 years as the small town it remains

Saturday was a fine day to wish Coplay a happy 150th birthday — sunny and not too hot — so the celebration of the little borough five miles north of Allentown drew early revelers to Sam Balliet Stadium.This included Joe and Gloria Fischl, 94 and 91, respectively, who sat in matching “Coplay Proud” T-shirts and reminisced about their 65 years of quiet borough living.For Joe, a longtime custodian in the Whitehall-Coplay School District, that included countless evenings at Balliet Stadium coaching youth baseball.“You could walk where you had to go,” Gloria said. “You could walk to the market, walk to the church.”The Fischls never locked their doors. It was that kind of place.“Like Mayberry,” said Councilman Steve Burker, comparing his adopted hometown — he grew up just outside the borough, in Whitehall Township — to Andy Griffith’s quintessential slice of televised Americana.“It really does have that small town feel, where almost everybody knows everybody,” Burker said.Coplay isn’t much bigger than what you’d imagine Mayberry to be. It’s a half a square mile and home to about 3,300 people — just 700 or so more than lived there in 1910.It’s quiet and tidy. When someone moves out, it isn’t long before someone else moves in.“A home doesn’t last long on the market,” Burker said, “and that should tell you something.”Coplay was originally called Schreibers after John Jacob Schreiber, who purchased 400 acres from the heirs of William Penn in 1740. When the iron industry arrived, it was renamed Lehigh Valley, then Coplay — a name derived from Kolapechka, who was the son of an Indian chief.The borough came into its own after breaking away from Whitehall Township and incorporating on April 7, 1869. It became an industrial town. Among the knickknacks on sale Saturday were garden flags bearing the slogan “An Opportunity Community” and renderings of the nine vertical cement kilns still standing in the borough from its industrial heyday.The kilns, furnaces used for the manufacturing of concrete, were designed after ones created in the Danish city of Aalborg during a boom in the cement industry. At the time, the design was cutting-edge technology in Europe. A decision by Coplay Cement’s superintendent to bring the method to America was seen as enterprising.But better technology came along and by 1904, the kilns, built in the early 1890s, were shut down. Little has come of preservation efforts in the ensuing years, because the work is so costly.Burker said this is one of the borough’s perennial headaches. He prefers to talk about the Coplay Community Plaza — a former vacant lot at North Second and Chestnut streets that was converted into a gathering area and hosts music and other entertainment every Wednesday.The crowds it attracts gladden Burker’s civic heart.“I see that plaza packed on a Wednesday night, and before it was an eyesore,” he said.
Source: Morningcall