The names of a number of other places in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania are similarly inspired, including Bethlehem, Emmaus, Egypt, and Allentown's Jordan Creek.

In 1735, a small group of Moravian missionaries began working in the newly settled community of Savannah, Georgia, where they sought to evangelize the Native American tribes and minister to the settlers.

George Whitefield, a widely known itinerant preacher who served as chaplain of Savannah, brought the group of evicted Georgia Brethren north to Philadelphia in his sloop.

Whitefield had grandiose plans, including building a school for Negro children on his tract of 5,000 acres (20 km2), called the Barony of Nazareth.

In December 1742, Count Zinzendorf, a Moravian benefactor, negotiated a settlement with Captain John, and his tribe moved back into the hinterland.

It later attained wide fame as a "classical academy", which led to the founding, in 1807, of Moravian College and Theological Seminary, now located in Bethlehem.

Many Pennsylvania Dutch also came from Switzerland and the Alsace region of France, in addition to the modern nation of Germany, Nazareth's residents' religion reflected a largely German background in evangelical churches of fairly large sizes for such a small town, divided among the Moravian, Lutheran, Reformed (now part of the United Church of Christ), and Roman Catholic worship centers of the town.

The town also hosted a fairly sizable Italian and Polish population, which largely attended Holy Family Catholic Church, in the area.

During a great immigration to the eastern Pennsylvania counties of the late 1900s from New Jersey and New York, the population expanded significantly.

This new expansion and housing boom was enabled by the local completion of the interstate system of highways, first begun by former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Nazareth's climate is similar to the rest of the Lehigh Valley with four distinct seasons, humid summers, cold winters, and very short and mild springs and falls.

This climate is hot-summer humid continental (Dfa) and average monthly temperatures range from 28.1 °F (−2.2 °C) in January to 73.4 °F (23.0 °C) in July.

Over the years, the company changed to spinning yarns out of manmade and natural fibers for clients to use in the manufacture of upholstery, clothing, and home furnishings.

The company also spun the Merino wool yarn that was used in creating the end-to-end American-made sweaters produced by the Ralph Lauren Corporation for the athletes of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Now, Martin Guitars are made largely on an assembly line monitored and assisted by workers, computers, and lasers.

Assembly lines at Martin were instituted to lower costs, improve speed of production, and compete with foreign manufacturers, without which efforts it is said that the company would have ceased to survive.

Stories of the hard pre-union days at the cement plants are replete with the description of twelve-hour days for survival wages, poor working and health conditions, and many dangerous incidents and accidents causing loss of life and or limb without medical plans or benefits to survivors.

Since the 1980s, however, the automation of the plants and eventual reselling of them to foreign firms has brought about the loss of most of the high-paying union cement jobs, presenting a blow to the Lehigh Valley economy.

The impact on the local economy of these lost cement jobs was intensified by the ultimate closing of neighboring Bethlehem Steel in 2003.