Historic 1st Ward
First Ward

  The First Ward was created under the name "Lehigh Ward" on August 30, 1852. It was the first section annexed to Allentown beyond the original boundaries of the city as established by founder William Allen in 1762.

   With the building of the Lehigh Canal in the 1820s and 30s, which carried coal from north of Mauch Chunk, now Jim Thorpe to Easton, a small transshipment place called Lehigh Port at the junction of the Little Lehigh Creek, the Lehigh River and the nearby Lehigh Canal grew up. Later railroads and stockyards tended to locate there.

    "This section," writes Charles Rhodes Roberts in his 1914 History of Lehigh County, "was locally dubbed St. Domingo, from the fact that it was the residence of quite a number of Negro families, and was familiarly called "Mingo."

    St. Domingo was apparently short for Santo Domingo the name the Spanish gave to their half of the island of Hispaniola today it is the name of the capital city of the Dominican Republic. The French side became Haiti.

      The unrest in Santo Domingo following the Revolution of 1791 led by Haiti's Toussaint l' Ouverture, caused many residents of the island black and white to flee to America, some to Philadelphia. How many of  the black people in Allentown were actually from the West Indies or were in fact African Americans is impossible to know. It may just be that ignorance of geography led locals to assume all blacks must be from Santo Domingo.

   These black people were probably canal workers or the descendents of canal workers. It was known that Irish immigrants and African Americans were the chief labor force for building the Lehigh Canal. Although the name Mingo was still in use as late as the 1920s as a nickname for the 1st Wards amateur sports teams as early as the 1860 census there were only 6 African Americans in Allentown.

      The Lehigh Ward became the First Ward in 1859. It was enlarged on March 8, 1860 to include the land north between the Lehigh River and the Jordan Creek. In 1867 it was divided into two at Gordon Street. North of Gordon became the 6th Ward.

     Since its creation the First Ward was dominated by industry. Iron furnaces were common in the 1850s 60s and 70s, brewing, coal yards and meat packing from the 1900s to the 1960s.

      Even in the industrial city that was Allentown in those years these were particularly tough job with heavy labor required. The population was largely Pennsylvania German or, after 1870 European German, Austrian and Hungarian immigrants. This mix was pretty stable, most of the Eastern European or Italian immigration to Allentown skipped over the First Ward for the polyglot 6th Ward. The 1st Ward churches were holding services in both German and English into the 1970s.

     To old time Allentown types the first and sixth wards are just generally lumped together as "the wards" code words for a place of ethnic, tough, hard scrabble, hard drinking blue collar types. Ambitious residents found it was a great place to be from. Many fled as soon as they could find better paying jobs and homes.