The Macungie area’s business and industry changed greatly over time. By the end of the 1700s, a few small businesses and industries had begun, including mills, tanneries, harness shops, and blacksmiths that served farmers, along with hotels and taverns, livery stables, wagon works, tinsmiths, butchers, brick yards, general stores, builders, and at least one foundry for the growing community. Inns were the earliest businesses, and mills were the earliest industry. In the mostly non-cash economy of the early period, millers often took part of a farmer’s grain as payment for grinding. The mills first used waterpower, and some later converted to steam or diesel power in the late 1800s. Dealers in equipment for farming and the iron-mining industry appeared in the mid-1800s. Before 1876, William Gehman started a lumber and coal yard along the railroad in East Macungie, and a similar business, Dries Do-It Center, still operates at that location. In the 1880s, when tobacco for cigars was a major Pennsylvania industry, East Macungie had production shops, two tobacco-curing houses, a cigar manufactory where women and girls rolled cigars, and a cigar-box factory. After iron production became Lehigh County’s main industrial activity, the range of industries and the number of people working off the farm grew rapidly. From 1850 to 1860, Allentown’s population more than doubled, and nearly all food for that growing population was produced locally except oysters, which arrived by train in shipments of hundreds of thousands from the late 1800s into the early 1900s, when they were cheap and plentiful. Small shops run by entrepreneurs, inventors, and skilled mechanics making equipment, mostly for local customers, were common, especially in Wescosville. Lower Macungie’s only heavy industry was iron furnaces producing pigs for shipment elsewhere for rolling or forging, but those furnaces had gone out of business by the early 1900s. Today, a large Mack Trucks assembly plant and Smooth-On, a maker of specialty materials for molds, are the major industries.