Lower Milford Township and the Hosensack Valley

A valley called the pants pocket

Hosensack is a small village in a narrow, wooded valley in Lower Milford Township. Hosensack Creek runs southwest through it and joins the Perkiomen Creek near Palm, which ties the valley to the larger Perkiomen country just over the Montgomery County line.

The name is German for a trouser pocket, and it is pronounced HOE-zen-sak. Nobody knows exactly when it came into use. The favorite local story is that teamsters, or in another telling a lost traveler, spent a night in the valley and said it was as dark as the inside of a pants pocket.

German settlers on the frontier

In the early 1700s this was the back edge of Bucks County, well beyond the farms near Philadelphia. The township's own history says pioneers began settling the Hosensack valley around 1715, and the state lists Lower Milford as settled by 1733.

Almost all of these settlers were German-speaking. In 1737 a group of them petitioned to organize a township. Their names show who was here: Krauss, Dillinger, Ochs, Walber, Schantz, Yeakel, Mechling, Kurr, Ort, Dubbs, Stauffer, Engleman, Klein, Kriebel, and others. Several of these, such as Yeakel and Kriebel, were Schwenkfelder families who had come over in 1734. The new township was called Milford and covered both of today's Upper and Lower Milford.

Life here meant clearing woods, building log houses, and farming hilly ground with limestone and iron ore close by. Mills went up along the streams, and the King's Road, laid out in 1735, gave farmers a way to haul goods toward Philadelphia. Families spoke German at home, a habit that lasted well into the 1800s and grew into the Pennsylvania German dialect.

The Schwenkfelders of Hosensack

When the Schwenkfelders arrived in 1734, they could not find one large tract of land for everyone, so they spread out across several townships. One cluster grew up in the upper Perkiomen region, including the Hosensack valley.

In December 1761 the immigrant Hans Heinrich Yeakel bought 500 acres in the valley. Family tradition says he paid in cash from his saddlebags. After his death in 1781 his four sons divided the land into farms. In the summer of 1790, on about an acre and a quarter given by two of those sons, the Schwenkfelders built a log building that served as both a schoolhouse and a meetinghouse. It was the first public place of worship the Schwenkfelders built anywhere in America. Its school, remembered as the Hosensack Academy, was open to children of any faith.

The log building was replaced in 1838 by the stone meetinghouse that still stands. It was remodeled in 1893 and used for worship until the new Palm Schwenkfelder Church was dedicated in 1911. Inside, men and women sat on opposite sides, and the deacons took up the offering at the back door as people left. The small cemetery beside it holds burials from 1791 on, including three of the original immigrants, all of the Yeakel family. Hans Heinrich Yeakel himself lies in a private family burial ground nearby.

Becoming Lower Milford

The county lines moved around the farmers more than once. The area was part of Bucks County until 1752, when Northampton County was created, and part of Northampton until Lehigh County was formed in 1812. Milford Township was eventually split in two, and Lower Milford became its own township in 1852 to 1853. The Pennsylvania state archives give the date as December 8, 1852, while the township gives 1853.

A post office opened at Hosensack in 1841 and closed in 1910. The nearby Dillingersville Union School and Church, built in 1885, is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

Lower Milford today

Lower Milford is still mostly farms, woods, and scattered homes, with about 3,900 residents. Most of its children attend the Southern Lehigh School District. The Hosensack meetinghouse is cared for by the Palm Schwenkfelder Church, which in the 1930s also bought land across the road along the creek for a picnic grove that is still used for gatherings.