BETHLEHEM, Pa. - WLVR’s Brad Klein spoke with Professor Scott Gordon of Lehigh University about a breathtaking discovery he made last summer.
An 18th-century register provides the names of every enslaved person in Northampton County in the year 1780.
- Scott Gordon is a Lehigh University professor
- He's giving a presentation on his find at 5 p.m. Thursday at the Sigal Museum in Easton
- The slave register for Northampton County has 58 names
Gordon, who teaches English and history at Lehigh, will be speaking at the Sigal Museum in Easton at 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 23.
His talk is called "Slavery in Bethlehem: The Rediscovered 1780 Register of Northampton County's Enslaved Persons."
A law approved in Pennsylvania in 1780 required all residents to register the names of all men, women and children they owned. Gordon said he found the document while combing through records at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia while looking for something else.
"The register for Northampton County is just two pages with a list of the names of enslaved men and women, their ages, their enslavers and the place where they were enslaved," Gordon said.
The register has 58 names on it. Slave owners identified on the register include tavern keepers, attorneys, farmers and ironmaster George Taylor of Easton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Click above to listen for more about the historical value of the find and what else it can tell us about the history of the region.
