Once you leave the construction, and the hustle and confusion of the highway, the trip to Sellersville seems like a passage to another Pennsylvania. The road is named the Allentown Pike, christened no doubt in the age of the horse and buggy. Late 19th and early 20th century dwellings hug the road.
Some are carefully tended and resemble something like that they did when their Pennsylvania German farm families built them a century and a half or more ago, perhaps replacing even older log cabins that ancestors first built. Others clearly have seen better days. Frequently along the route there are deep, dark woods filled with trees and landscape that might have been familiar to the Lenape.
Then, shortly after you cross a one lane bridge and are headed down a slight slope, a vista opens on the right and in the near distance is a large stone church with a parking lot behind it. A cemetery is nearby. This is St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church Ridge Valley, since the early 20th century the house of worship for that congregation…