Of all the days on the Berks County calendar, none is older than the Fourth of July — for in a very real sense, the county was present at the creation. Before there were parades down Penn Street, before the cannon roared from Leinbach’s Hill, before fireworks ever bloomed over Mount Penn, the people of Reading and Berks had already thrown in their lot with the cause of independence. The story of the Fourth here is not merely a story of picnics and pyrotechnics. It is the story of a German-settled, English-named shire that helped light the fire — and has kept it burning for two and a half centuries.
“On the 4th of July, 1776”
Berks County did not wait for Philadelphia to tell it how to feel. Two years before the Declaration, on July 2, 1774, “a public meeting was called in the old Court House” in Reading to draw up resolutions urging measures that would, “with precision, settle the rights and liberties of Americans.” (The Story of the Bell)
When the great day came, the news of it traveled fast. As Cyrus T. Fox recorded in his history of the county:
“Congress on the 4th of July 1776, in session in Philadelphia, having drawn up and passed, signs and proclaims to the world boldly, its Declaration of Independence from the tyrannical rule of the British Parliament. The news travelled almost on wings of lightning. It soon reached Berks County, where already public indignation meetings had been held and recruiting stations for the army were maintained. Here at Reading the sheriff of the county, a Mr. Vanderslice, publicly read the Declaration to an assembled multitude, according to orders from Congress.” (Reading and Berks County Pennsylvania: A History, Vol. II)
Picture the scene: the sheriff — Henry Vanderslice — standing before a gathered crowd in the young frontier town, reading out the words that had just been signed a day’s ride to the southeast. From that moment, Fox wrote, “the county loyally dedicated itself to the long struggle, involving heavy expense, terrible hardships and considerable suffering and sacrifice.” Local iron masters would soon cast cannon and shot for Washington’s army; captured Hessians would be marched to the slopes of Mount Penn. The Fourth of July in Berks County began not as a celebration, but as a solemn commitment.
Years ago, one Independence Day tradition was to load a wagon with spirited patriots and “parade around” in celebration. In this Leesport scene, taken along what is now Hafer Drive near the former Ontelaunee Elementary School, two women can be seen holding hunting horns, adding plenty of noise to the patriotic festivities.
The Semi-Centennial: 1826
By the fiftieth anniversary of independence, that solemn commitment had matured into ceremony. On the Fourth of July, 1826 — the Semi-Centennial of American Independence, the very day both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died — Reading marked the occasion with military companies, sacred oratory, and a pilgrimage to hallowed ground.
“The Reading Artillerists and the Lafayette Guards marched to Trinity Lutheran Church,” the record tells us, “where the Reverend Henry A. Muhlenberg delivered a rousing patriotic sermon.” Then the entourage marched again — not to the Courthouse or Penn’s Common or a fashionable tavern, but out to Biddle’s Spring, described by the Reading Eagle as “historic ground,” the site of “a cabin built by the founder of the town.” There the Declaration of Independence was read aloud by lawyer William Darling, followed by an address from lawyer William Leavenworth. (The Ford at the Schuylkill)
Fifty years on, Reading was still doing what Sheriff Vanderslice had done in 1776 — reading the Declaration aloud, out loud, to a gathered crowd.
Cannon on the Hill and “General Jollification”
For much of the nineteenth century, the sound of the Fourth in Reading was the sound of a single, storied cannon. Perched on its elevated position atop Yeager’s — later Leinbach’s — Hill in West Reading, overlooking the Schuylkill, the “Reading cannon” was “let loose” every New Year and every Independence Day. Artist John Hanold Kendall captured it in his “Topographic View of Reading 1844,” a black speck of thunder above the river and the old Penn Street Bridge. It stood in position from the 1700s and probably remained until the Civil War era. (The Passing Scene, Vol. 4)
To recover the flavor of a genuine old-time Fourth, we can turn to the newspapers. The Reading Eagle on this day in 1884 reported that “the 108th anniversary of American Independence is being celebrated in Reading with fireworks and general jollification,” with “Young America” taking full advantage of the holiday. (The Passing Scene, Vol. 4)
Fireworks and general jollification — for a good long while, that was the whole of it.
When the City Quieted the Fourth
The jollification, however, had a cost. The lines of fireworks injuries in local hospitals and the tents along the roads where any child could buy a firecracker eventually prompted the city to act. Reading Mayor John Keirn Stauffer signed a tough anti-fireworks law — one “largely ignored” — which was later toughened under Mayor Stump. “Gone also were those tents along the road where fireworks could be purchased. Gone were the lines of fireworks injuries in local hospitals.”
By 1939, the change was unmistakable. “Police were out on the roads in full force over the 4th, on the lookout for drunken or reckless drivers and speeders.” And even the old-timers “who could remember the cannon being fired on Leinbach’s Hill in West Reading, overlooking the Schuylkill, could not remember a 4th this quiet.” (Pendora: Forgotten Trolley Park of Reading)
The crowds did not disappear — they simply moved. Reading-area attractions still drew their throngs on both mountains and at the city parks, trading gunpowder for picnic baskets.
A Quiet Fourth in Wartime: 1945
The quietest Fourths of all came with the Second World War. In the summer of 1945, Reading Newsweek — the wartime digest mailed to Berks County’s service men and women scattered across the globe — carried the headline “Reading And Berks Enjoy Quiet Fourth: Circus, Parks, Picnics Are Chief Attractions.”
“Reading and Berks County observed their fourth Independence Day since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor threw this country into World War II,” the paper reported. “Buses and street cars carried throngs of picnickers from the city to parks and spots in the country-side. Among them were many service men in ribbon-decorated uniforms for whom this was the first Fourth of July celebration in this country and with their families in a number of years.”
Some of those men were “home to stay, their services in the armed forces at an end.” For many others — “soldiers, sailors and marines” who had already fought in Europe — “it was the last family reunion before they become engaged in the war against Japan.” (Reading Newsweek, Vol. 2)
It is one of the tenderest portraits of the holiday in all the county’s records: a quiet Fourth, a circus and a picnic, and a uniformed son home for one more summer afternoon.
The Bicentennial: 1976
If 1826 was ceremony and 1945 was quiet reunion, the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976 was pure spectacle — and a homecoming across the sea. That summer a delegation from Reading, England, led by Mayor Kathleen L. Sage, arrived in its Pennsylvania namesake to help in the national celebration.
On July 4, 1976, “Reading’s version of the Liberty Bell” was carried by horse-drawn carriage from the Berks County Historical Society in a parade to Penn Square. There, in a moment that closed a circle two hundred years wide, Sheriff John H. Kramer — “re-creating the role of his colonial-era counterpart Sheriff Henry Vanderslice” — read the Declaration of Independence aloud in Penn Square, just as Vanderslice himself had done in 1776. After thousands witnessed the downtown ceremony, “the celebration moves to Municipal Stadium where fireworks cap the festivities.” (Reading Towne, Vol. 1)
Two centuries apart, the same words, the same square, a sheriff’s voice — the town reading its own founding aloud once more.
Fireworks Over the Pagoda
The tradition found perhaps its most striking modern image at Reading’s Bicenquinquagenary — the celebration of the city’s 250th year, 1748 to 1998. On that anniversary, for the first time ever, fireworks were launched from the Pagoda atop Mount Penn. Photographer Matthew J. Sroka captured Readingites “gathered in center city to watch fireworks launched from the Pagoda — a first-time occurrence,” his lens conveying “the reality of those who braved the elements to watch the mountain-top spectacle.” (The Passing Scene, Vol. 12)
The cannon on Leinbach’s Hill had fallen silent generations before. But the instinct that put it there — the need to mark this day loudly, from high ground, where the whole valley could hear and see — had simply found a new summit.
This Fourth of July
The people of Reading and Berks have kept this day for 250 years — through revolution and depression, through world war and homecoming. They have marked it with sermons and cannon fire, with parades and picnics, with a borrowed Liberty Bell and a mountain-top spectacle. But at the heart of it all remains the oldest ritual of them all: the one Sheriff Vanderslice began in 1776, and Sheriff Kramer repeated in 1976 — the simple, stubborn act of standing before the neighbors and reading aloud the words that made a nation.
Sources:Reading and Berks County Pennsylvania: A History, Vol. II (Cyrus T. Fox, 1925); The Story of the Bell (Ludy & Lehman, 1923); The Ford at the Schuylkill (Kathy M. Scogna); The Passing Scene, Vols. 4 and 12 (George M. & Gloria Jean Meiser); Pendora: Forgotten Trolley Park of Reading (Paul A. Druzba); Reading Newsweek, Vol. 2 (1944–1945); Reading Towne, Vol. 1, 1748–1847 (Meiser et al.).
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