Two cement works, and the names keep changing
A Hercules works burns cement 4.5 miles off at Stockertown with 125 people, and the Nazareth Plant 6.9 miles away carries 159 — the largest payroll within ten miles of here.
Ownership has moved repeatedly and the records lag it. Heidelberg bought Italcementi, which ran the Nazareth plant, in 2016; the American operations were renamed Lehigh Hanson and the group has since become Heidelberg Materials. Holcim spun its North American business off to Amrize in July 2025. A name on a gate here is often a company that no longer exists under it.
A state line four and a half miles away, and a mill on the wrong side of it
Beyond the cement, the river is the real boundary here. The North American Millers’ Association’s mill map lists a flour mill 1.5 miles off under Brainards, New Jersey, yet it stands in Northampton County, on this side of the water. The genuinely New Jersey sites start further out: sand and gravel operations 4.5 and 5.5 miles away in Warren County, an industrial sand pit 7.2 miles out at Columbia and a rail yard on the North American Rail Network maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics 7.1 miles off at Phillipsburg, all four of which do fall over the line.
So a truck working out of this place crosses a state line on ordinary daily work, and the two states title, register and inspect it differently. That is a paperwork fact rather than a driving one, and it is the thing most worth knowing about running here.
On this side the stone is close in: a limestone quarry 0.9 miles off with 3 people, the Easton Quarry 1.4 miles away with 15, and the Nazareth Quarry 6.3 miles out.
Pneumatic tankers off the cement, tandem and tri-axle dumps off the stone and the sand, flatbeds and day cabs, rollbacks, box trucks, service bodies and pickups.
Cement is unforgiving on a tank, a blower and a compressor, and none of that shows on an odometer. Between the works at Stockertown 4.5 miles off and the Easton Quarry 1.4 miles away the runs are short, so the mileage understates the work.
- The tank has cement build-up.Expected on this work. Around the Easton Quarry and the cement plants we see it constantly and it does not stop a sale.
A district that shrank from sixty plants to five has been shedding equipment for a long time, and the trucks that served the ones that closed did not all find new work.
Beyond that it is ordinary. Between Stockertown 4.5 miles off and the Nazareth Quarry 6.3 miles away there are retirements, estates and fleets renewing themselves like anywhere else.