Fowler Family Museum

St. Luke’s Hospital – Cherishing our Legacy

St. Luke’s Hospital is a legacy of caring. Its founders and their deeds are memorialized in The Fowler Family Museum – not to be forgotten in the dust of unused archives, but to stand always as models of inspiration for future generations of like spirit and commitment.

In the late 1800s, the bucolic Moravian farms of the Lehigh River area gave way to the zinc oxide and iron ore mines of adventurous industrialists. Railroads rumbled through the Valley as its mills, furnaces and factories laid the foundation on which the American Industrial Revolution was built.

But building a nation proved hard and dangerous work, and progress came with a price. Serious injuries skyrocketed, forcing workers to endure painful and long rides to hospitals in Philadelphia or go without adequate care. It is from this need that St. Luke’s Hospital took its mission, and it is for those in need that St. Luke’s still provides care. Were it not for the foresight and dedication of men like Tinsley Jeter, Asa Packer, Cortlandt Whitehead, John Smylie and Robert Sayre, the residents of the Lehigh Valley might not today enjoy such world-class health care so close to home.