How did Line Lexington, Pennsylvania get its name? This page provides a brief history about the naming of Line Lexington, Pennsylvania, the people who settled it, and the industry rising within it.
Line Lexington is a village in two counties and three townships at the intersection of County Line Road (Route 309) and the old Line Lexington and Hilltown Turnpike (Route 152). Convergence of boundary lines at the village places part of it in Hilltown and New Britain Townships, Bucks County, and Hatfield Township, Montgomery County. The township line is reputed to run through the village tavern. The landlord sleeps in New Britain, votes in Hilltown, and while standing behind the bar in Hilltown serves drinks to the thirsty standing in New Britain.
In 1800 the village was called Middletown from the fact that it was about midway on the coach line between Philadelphia and Bethlehem. The name was soon changed to Lexington after the historic town in Massachusetts where the Minute Men and Red Coats clashed in the first sanguinary engagement of the Revolutionary War. A post office was established in 1827. As there was another Lexington post office in the State, and some thirty others in other States, the name Line Lexington was adopted.
The Lexington Mennonite Church, with its large burying grounds and 825 marked graves, is now, since the organization of Doylestown Township (1819), the only church of that denomination in New Britain Township. The first log church was built on land purchased by four members of the congregation February 17, 1752. A stone building followed the log in 1808. That building was torn down in 1868 and replaced by the present structure, 45 by 60 feet, enlarged in 1935 by an annex for the Sunday School. The grounds were also enlarged several times by purchase of adjoining land.
Lexington was the first name of the station on the Doylestown Branch of the Reading Railway a mile south of the village. On April 29, 1873, the locomotive “Colmar” was used for the first time on the branch, then under the management of the North Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and about the same time the station name was changed to Colmar. The first North Penn locomotives bore names of company stations. The custom of numbering them came later. The name Colmar comes from the town of that name in Alsace, Germany, thirty miles south of Strasbourg.