Bingen, Pennsylvania, in Lower Saucon Township, grew from the North Pennsylvania Iron Company, established by the North Pennsylvania Railroad Company in 1869, and was named by railroad president F.A. Comly after Bingen on the Rhine in tribute to the area's German population. Iron production later passed to the Thomas Iron Company and continued until 1900, after which the property became the site of F.H. Clement & Co. and later Weyhill Farms, now the number two golf course for the Saucon Valley Country Club. Other important nineteenth-century businesses included the D.D. Ritter and A.S. Gangewer companies, which made bricks from clay separated from iron ore, and the Bingen Brick Company, which operated near the Reading Drive Trailhead until the late 1930s, while flour and feed mills and a blacksmithing business served local farmers. Railroad tracks between Philadelphia and Freemansburg were completed and placed in service on January 1, 1857, with local spur lines serving the Saucon Iron Company and the Friedensville Zinc Company; the line was leased by the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in 1879 as the Bethlehem Branch, became the Reading Railroad in 1924, was sold to Conrail in 1976 and then to SEPTA the same year, and its last passenger train ran in 1981. The village eventually included two stores, one hotel, a gristmill, the Saucon lime works, the Ebenezer New Reformed Church, a two-room schoolhouse, and about 20 houses. Built around 1871 just north of the trailhead, the railroad station contained the village post office, telegraph station, and a newsstand, but the post office was later moved to the Weiss Store until rural mail routes replaced it in the early 1930s, and the station was taken out of railroad service in the 1950s and later demolished. Near the Bingen Road crossing, Gruver's Hotel and the Weiss Store once served the community; the store was opened by the Yeager family between 1856 and 1857, later acquired by Preston Weiss, and operated there until 1962, while William Yeager, who ran the iron company's works, is believed to have sheltered runaway slaves in his home and barn along Bingen Road. Gruver's Hotel, next to the Weiss Store, included a barroom and barbershop and remained in business until the 1950s, and the Bingen House of Fashion, co-owned by a member of the Gruver family, operated in the building until 1988. On January 7, 1899, twenty-five-year-old night telegraph operator Harvey H. Wurster was murdered at Bingen Station after a quarrel with seventeen-year-old Llewellyn Stout, who struck him several times with a coupling pin, hid the body and stolen money, confessed after his arrest, was convicted of first-degree murder, and was executed on August 22, 1899; in later years, reports of a floating light and unexplained footsteps in the nearby woods gave rise to the story of the Ghost of Bingen.