{"nrhp_refnum":"75001649","name":"Bomberger's Distillery","other_names":["Michter's Distillery"],"category":"building","location":{"address":"7 mi. SW of Newmanstown off PA 501","address_restricted":false,"city":"Newmanstown","county":"Lebanon County","state":"PA","lat":40.27676242700005,"lon":-76.31958763224439,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1975-06-26","is_nhl":true,"nhl_designated_date":"1980-01-16","areas_of_significance":["Industry","Architecture"],"significance_levels":["national"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A working whiskey distillery complex at Newmanstown in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, known as Pennco or Bomberger's Distillery. Its three 19th-century buildings date to about 1860-1880 and sit within a 20th-century industrial complex.","why_significant":"The nomination argues the site has been used for distilling since 1795 and that its surviving distillery, warehouse and store are preserved examples of structures tied to the distilling process. It also states that traditional small-scale, hand-supervised distilling methods continue there, and that the operation has survived as a whiskey producer since the late eighteenth century.","narrative":"Distilling has taken place on this Lebanon County site in Newmanstown since at least 1795, according to Shank family records. The surviving 19th-century core includes a distillery building with mid-nineteenth-century structure, reused materials and original copper equipment, a brick and oak-framed warehouse built about 1875-1880 with pegged oak second-floor framing, and a frame store dating from 1870-1880 that served as a retail outlet for the distillery's products. The buildings are listed for their role in the distilling process and for the continuity of traditional pot distillation. Production remains at a small scale under master distiller C. Everett Beam, a descendant of Jacob Beam, whose methods are described as essentially the same as those of the Bomberger period. The nomination notes that the surrounding complex includes later 20th-century warehouses, a fermenting building, a bottling plant and a distilling tower.","period_of_significance":"1795 - 1860","architect_builder":null,"architectural_style":null,"criteria":[],"status_note":"Working distillery producing whiskey; the nomination also states an intention to develop the Bomberger Distillery into a working museum.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-haiku-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.1-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 17:11:30.691732-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_PA/75001649.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/75001649/900b3c6ad3-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/75001649/900b3c6ad3-1600.webp","licence":"CC0","author":"Smallbones","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bombergers_LebCo_PA_1.jpg\" rel=\"noopener\">Smallbones</a>, <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en\" rel=\"license noopener\">CC0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bombergers_LebCo_PA_1.jpg"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/71996735","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomberger%27s_Distillery","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4940635"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/pennsylvania/lebanon-county/bombergers-distillery-75001649/"}