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.
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:…