When they heard of the fire in their old neighborhood, Dan and Barbara McGovern were stunned. Although they had long ago retired, they retained deep memories of a childhood growing up on a street behind what they knew in their youth as the Gottlieb Buehler & Company furniture company in Allentown’s industrial First Ward.
Having a medical errand to run downtown, Dan and his wife decided to also see what the blaze had done to the old neighborhood. They were stunned by the depth of the destruction of the old factory that looked like a bombed-out structure from a World War II-era newsreel.
Ghostly walls rose against the sky. The place where more than 200 workers once toiled to make frames for parlor furniture was now bent steel and charred wood. Dan, who grew up on Pine Street near the factory, found the neighborhood where he once lived and recalled the sound of the machinery, that was now only a memory.
Fortunately, long before the fire took place that machinery and many other significant items from Allentown’s industrial past were saved. In the 1980s Lance Metz, then the industrial historian with the National Canal Museum in Easton, contacted Louis “J.G.” Buehler, grandson of Gottlieb Buehler, and arranged to have many of the artifacts transferred to the museum…