Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near North Coplay Coplay, PA

Coplay is a small borough in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, about six miles northwest of Allentown in the Lehigh Valley metropolitan area.

Coplay's land was part of 400 acres that John Jacob Schreiber bought from the heirs of William Penn in 1740, and the settlement was long known simply as Schreibers.

The name Coplay is derived from Kolapechka, the son of the Native American chief Paxanosa, who lived at the head of the creek near Schnecksville.

Coplay seceded from Whitehall Township and was incorporated as a borough on April 7, 1869, and it celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2019.

Coplay had 3,348 residents at the 2020 census, and the 2000 census counted 3,387 people living in 1,431 households in the borough.

The Thomas Iron Company and the Lehigh Valley Iron Furnaces turned Coplay from a farming village into an industrial community in the 1800s.

David O. Saylor co-founded the Coplay Cement Company in 1866 and received the first American patent for Portland cement in 1871, earning him the title of father of the American Portland cement industry.

By 1900, the Lehigh Valley around Coplay produced about 72 percent of all the Portland cement made in the United States.

Coplay's Saylor Park is an open-air industrial museum built around nine 90-foot-tall Schoefer vertical cement kilns erected in 1892-1893, which are believed to be the last kilns of their type still standing anywhere in the world.

The Coplay Cement Company Kilns were shut down in 1904, donated to Lehigh County in 1975, and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.