Belfast, PA

Belfast is a Northampton County census-designated place in Plainfield Township, with 1,279 residents at the 2020 census. It sits in one of the township's first settled areas, where German and Welsh settlers arrived in the late eighteenth century. Locals believe those settlers gave the village the name of Belfast, after the city in Northern Ireland. That older settlement history sits inside a rural township whose farming roots reach back to the county's earliest roads and boundary lines.

Plainfield Township treats Belfast as one of its village centers, and the community is part of the Pen Argyl Area School District; students in grades nine through twelve attend high school in Pen Argyl. The Lehigh Valley is the larger regional map, but Belfast still reads as a small village with its own name, school connection, and farm-country setting. It is the sort of place whose identity comes less from a single landmark than from being one of the old settlements that still gives the township a set of recognizable stops.