Final tales from Newburg Inn
Set to be demolished, it dates to 1700s
The Newburg Inn has a storied past, ranging from its connection to the Revolutionary War to rumors it was a house of ill repute in the mid-1900s to tales of hauntings.
Now, as the inn comes to its final days, a group of historians are hoping to find out the truth about how long it has sat at the intersection of Newburg Road and Route 191.
The centuries-old structure is owned by Lower Nazareth Township and is slated to be demolished by October as part of a plan to make the infamously congested intersection more traversable. The historians have been examining the structure and hope to preserve pieces of it even after the building is gone. They also want to date some of the building’s beams, which might have been there since the mid-1700s and can offer a glimpse into that era.
“No one ever really knew there was a remnant there,” said Greg Huber, an architectural historian. “That’s why it’s so important, it fills in a gap of this early architecture. Anything existing in the county before 1780 is very rare, so this is especially important.”
Dating some of the wood beams will use a process called dendrochronology. The township will pay for about half the cost, which could add up to several hundred dollars.
The Newburg Inn has stood at the crossroads for centuries. Its location — at the intersection of a road connecting Bethlehem to Nazareth and another connecting Bath to Easton, where the ferry across the Delaware River was even before the city was founded — made it a critical spot for hundreds of years, local historian Richard Musselman said.
“It was a logical place for
them to build a tavern,” he said. “The problem is finding early records.”
He found a tavern license for the property from 1767 in the county archives.
It was supposedly Jacob Hartzell who built an inn and tavern at the intersection and passed it on to his son Jonas in the 1760s, Musselman said. Jonas, whose name was on the license, was an officer in the Northampton County militia in the Revolutionary War and a Northampton County sheriff twice, he said.
The property changed hands at least half a dozen times between then and now, Musselman said, and has been altered and modified several times.
That’s partially why Huber didn’t expect to find much when he went into the cluttered and vacant building a few weeks ago. The Newburg Inn Grillhouse & Bar closed in July 2018, and then the township bought it for $423,000 as part of its plans to widen the intersection. Items in the restaurant — old lighting fixtures, barn wood and memorabilia — were sold at auction in January, netting the township $14,000, Township Manager Lori Stauffer said.
When Huber went to check it out, he didn’t find much of note on the first or second floors, but recycled beams in the attic indicated there could be some older items.
Then he went to the basement, where he saw signs that the structure was unusually old. There was a lot of water damage to stone walls, and an oak summer beam that stretched across the entire length of the house.
It’s that summer beam and some other supports that he’d like to get dated.
That process involves taking core samples of the wood, polishing them, and then analyzing the rings on the wood to determine when the tree it came from was felled, said Michael Cuba, a historic preservation joiner who examined the Newburg Inn this month.
He said most wood from the basement and up appear circular-sawn, a technology that became available around the 1850s. He imagines the building was largely gutted and rebuilt
just after the Civil War. Trims and moldings with an embellished Greek profile also indicate alterations around the 1870s, he said.
But there are some beams in the basement that could be older. There’s nothing about the summer beam’s appearance that precludes it from being original, Cuba said, and there are other beams in the basement that could also be original. But, he said, they don’t appear to be in the original configuration.
The intersection was identified as problematic by the township 15 years ago. It has an F
grade, meaning a typical traveler will spend 180 seconds or more when they approach the intersection
and then successfully cross it, Stauffer said.
“With the additional development of homes and warehouses not just in Lower Nazareth but in the surrounding communities, that travel through that intersection, the level of service has not gotten any better,” Stauffer said.
Even once the inn is gone, Huber would like to see some sort of marker to commemorate it. Musselman is hoping people can share more old photos of the structure.
And township officials are hoping to get samples to display in their municipal building lobby.
“It’s the oldest building in Lower Nazareth Township, and so for [the Board of Supervisors], they felt that spending a certain amount of money to at least preserve some historical aspect of the building was worth it,” Stauffer said.