Bernville: History, Main Street, and Christmas Lights

Explore Bernville by Travel Interest

A trip to Bernville offers several distinct themes to choose from: a self-guided tour of Main Street, local history and collections, and Koziar’s Christmas Village as a vintage Christmas lights experience. If you’re looking for a hotel in Bernville, the reason for your trip can help you choose what to focus on. Would you like to plan a walking tour, explore historical connections, or make the Christmas lights experience the centerpiece? These themes offer different directions for planning your trip.

The self-guided tour runs along Bernville’s Main Street and begins at the entrance to Umbenhauer Park. Both the theme and the starting point are clearly identified. If you’d like to explore Bernville along its Main Street, you can use this tour to guide your plans. Its self-guided format distinguishes it from the individual historical connections offered by the church, canal, and local collections.

Architecture and Local History

Evangelical Lutheran Friedens Church is a Gothic Revival-style church on its original site at the corner of Main Street and Washington Street in Bernville. For travel plans focused on architecture, this gives you two specific details: the style and the exact location at the street corner. The Union Canal adds a different topic to the historical picture. It opened in 1828; Lock #36 was immediately south of Main Street in Bernville. For the church, the style and site define its historical connection; for the canal, those details are the opening year and the location of Lock #36.

The name Bernville also offers a precisely dated historical connection: the borough was named in January 1820 after Berne, Switzerland, the hometown of Thomas Umbenhauer’s grandfather. The naming took place eight years before the Union Canal opened. The place name and the canal’s history therefore represent two distinct points in time that you can keep separate as you explore Bernville’s past.

Collections and Other Travel Interests

The Bernville Area Community Library brings several forms of local history into view. It houses a local history collection and displays rotating exhibits featuring items from the Bernville Heritage & Cultural Society collection. Historical documents about Bernville are available in paper form at the library’s History Center. The Society has collected or acquired hundreds of historical items related to the Borough of Bernville and the immediate surrounding area. The materials are not all of the same kind, which is useful to keep in mind when choosing what interests you: they include rotating exhibits of objects, a local history collection, and paper documents in the History Center. The local history theme encompasses both objects and written records.

Koziar’s Christmas Village offers a different focus: it is a vintage Christmas lights experience with a park-and-walk format. Its address is 782 Christmas Village Road, Bernville, Pennsylvania 19506. Sheidy Boat Launch is located at 5998 Bernville Road in Bernville. Both destinations are identified by a specific street address; in terms of their subject matter, they differ from the Main Street tour and the local history themes. Which of these interests matters most to you is a useful starting point when looking for a hotel in Bernville.

Explore more destinations: New Morgan, Boyertown, Reading, Wernersville, Macungie, Fleetwood, West Reading, Shillington.

For the broader travel overview: Berks.