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Allentown was originally named Northamptontown by its founder, Chief Justice of Colonial Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, William Allen. Allen, also a former Mayor of Philadelphia and successful businessman, drew up plans for the rural village in 1762. Despite its formal name, from the beginning, nearly everyone called it “Allen’s town.” Allen hoped his village on the banks of the Lehigh River would evolve into a thriving commercial center. It was not to be. The low water level most of the year made river trade impractical. Sometime in the early 1770s, William Allen gave the property to his son, James, who built a country home here called Trout Hall after his father’s hunting and fishing lodge. Even by the time of the American Revolution, Allentown remained little more than a small hamlet of German, farmers and tradesmen.
By the 1850s, however, on the back of the local iron industry, this youngest of the three cities in the Lehigh Valley had become the largest, as it remains today. From its founding in 1762 until its incorporation as a city in 1859, Allentown’s boundaries were 4th and 10th Streets, east to west, and Liberty and Union Streets, north to south. The Old Allentown Historic District comprises the northwest quadrant of the city’s original plan, with the addition of the blocks west to 12th Street between Liberty and Linden, including the 14-acre Union and West End Cemetery in the District’s northwest corner.
This area developed rapidly as a result of a series of speculative real-estate booms (and busts) during the period 1865–1910. Early frame houses were replaced by more substantial two-and three-story row houses that took advantage of all usable space on both the main streets and the half-streets and alleys to meet the housing needs of a growing and changing population. Though primarily a residential district, Old Allentown contains the typical 19th-century mix of housing with commercial buildings, factories, stables, churches, schools, and saloons. Some of these latter structures stand on the sites of former brickyards and sawmills, which supplied the materials used to construct the neighborhood’s buildings.
While Old Allentown contains many individual buildings of great charm, its historic value and distinction lie in its ensemble character. Our walking tour of this dense, richly textured 19th-century urban environment will start in Allentown Arts Park, a greenspace just off the main thoroughfare of Hamilton Street...
Before the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) stretched between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, a system of railroads, canals and inclined planes across the Alleghenies, known as the Main Line of Public Works, linked the eastern and western sections of the state. The system was time consuming and inefficient, if not entirely useless during the winter freeze and spring floods. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania was rapidly being usurped by New York state and its Erie Canal as America’s pathway to the West.
The State Canal Commission looked to compete with a cross-state train route for which their engineer, Charles L. Schlatter, identified three possible routes. Understandably, when the founders of the PRR approached the State legislature in 1846 to build the railroad, the latter passed an act incorporating the Pennsylvania Railroad Company and granted its charter. John Edgar Thomson, Chief Engineer of the new company, then selected Schlatter’s central or Juniata-Conemaugh River route. Because Thomson’s scheme maximized use of the low grades over the majority of the route west with a short, but steep climb over the mountains, he needed additional engine power to be available at a convenient location. The point at which the water grade ended and the mountain passage began was Robinson’s Ridge, the present site of Altoona, located 117 miles east of Pittsburgh and 235 miles west of Philadelphia. Here, beginning in 1849, the PRR built a facility for housing and repairing the additional motive power ― it also spurred the development of a city.
West of town the challenge of carrying the Pennsylvania Railroad Mainline over the rugged Allegheny Mountains was met with the design and construction of “The Horseshoe Curve” in 1854. The huge lop connects one side of the valley with the other and was carved from the rugged mountainside entirely by men using picks, shovels and horses. To this day, the curve is considered to be an engineering marvel. Spending so much time digging out the curve it was natural that Altoona would become the major supplying town to the railroad industry, and for several years Altoona was the greatest railroad town in America.
Altoona was incorporated as a borough on February 6, 1854, and as a city under legislation approved on April 3, 1867, and February 8, 1868. The town grew rapidly in the late 19th century, its population approximately 2,000 in 1854, 10,000 in 1870, and 20,000 in 1880. In the early 20th century, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Altoona Works complex alone employed, at its peak, approximately 15,000 people and covered three miles in length, 218 acres of yards and 37 acres of indoor workshop floor space in 122 buildings.
Live by the railroad, die by the railroad; Altoona declined in tandem with the abandonment of rail passenger service in America after World War II. Our walking tour will concentrate on the downtown area and visit financial sites, cultural sites, residential sites, sacred sites and, of course, the remnants of the largest railroad shops America has ever seen...
Bellefonte lies in a spot where an enormous mountain spring that emits as much as 13.5-million gallons a day -- enough to supply a 17-foot-wide stream. In 1785, William Lamb used that water to power a flour mill. The community that developed around the mill was known as Lamb’s Crossing.
Lamb sold his mill, the spring, and 800 acres in the 1790s to James Dunlop, an ironmaster from Cumberland Valley. Soon James Harris and James Dunlop, his father-in-law, laid out, block by block, a village they called “Big Spring.” Tradition holds that the town was named “Bellefonte” by Nancy Harris, Dunlop’s daughter and James’ wife. It happened during a visit by the French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. When Mrs. Harris showed him the massive spring, he exclaimed, “La belle font!” and that, she thought, was a most appropriate name for the town. Others believe the name sprouted from the Bell Fonte forge that was operating at the time.
Bellefonte, rich with iron-industry money, became the most influential town in Pennsylvania between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Its big-city trappings included six opera houses, and at one point, two daily and five weekly newspapers. The Centre Democrat, founded by General Philip Benner in 1827, was one of the oldest weekly newspapers in the United States
Early on Bellefonte battled the larger Milesburg for the county seat and a display of superior political muscle landed the Centre County government in Bellefonte in 1805. The first county court house--an unpretentious two story stone building--was erected on the site of the present court house. Bellefonte was to become a political breeding ground in the 19th century - five Pennsylvania governors hailed from the town in the 1800s.
The business district that developed about the Diamond (directly in front of the courthouse) is one of Pennsylvania’s most eye-catching. Our walking tour will get there soon enough but we’ll start near the historic Big Spring, one of the ten largest springs in the Commonwealth, that gave birth to the town...
In 1741 a small band of Moravian missionaries representing the Unitas Fratrum, founded in 1457 by followers of John Hus and now recognized as the oldest organized Protestant denomination in the world, walked into the wilderness and began a settlement on the banks of the Lehigh River near the Monocacy Creek. From the start it was to be a planned community in which property, privacy and personal relationships were to be subordinated to a common effort to achieve a spiritual ideal. On Christmas Eve of that first year the Moravians’ patron, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf of Saxony, Germany, visited the new settlement. Over dinner, the Count christened the community “Bethlehem” to commemorate his visit.
To encourage communal living the Moravians built large Germanic-style structures of native limestone known as “choirs.” Choirs were organized by gender and age and marital status so there were choirs for single men, married couples, little girls and so on. Some of these sturdy structures, among the most impressive buildings constructed in pre-Revolutionary America, have been in continuous use for over 250 years. The self-sufficient community wasted no time in building industry - more than three dozen trades and mills were in operation within five years. Goods from Bethlehem were known throughout the American colonies.
This heritage of manufacturing braced Bethlehem perfectly for the oncoming Industrial Revolution. When the Lehigh Canal opened in 1829, quickly followed by the Lehigh Valley Railroad, Bethlehem became a nationally known center of heavy industry. The zinc industry was centered here and iron companies were established by the 1850s. Through the building of government ordnance the Bethlehem Iron Works and then Bethlehem Steel Company were supplying war efforts around the globe.
Much of the face of present-day Bethlehem dates back to 1904 and the arrival in town of 42-year old Charles Michael Schwab. At age 39 Schwab was president of the biggest company in the world, United States Steel Corp. But after personality conflicts there, he left to take over and remake Bethlehem Steel Company and began pushing for a new type of wide-flange steel beam that required building an entire new mill. The H-beam and its descendent, the I-beam, would revolutionize the construction trade and make Bethlehem Steel the second largest steel company in the world.
Away from the office Schwab united the city from four fractious municipalities. He filled the surrounding neighborhoods with Bethlehem Steel employees and spurred the building of landmark neighborhoods such at Mt. Airy, where many of his executives set up camp. Our walking tour will focus on the streets and buildings of the Moravian community in historic central Bethlehem but, before that, we will start at one building that stands as a legacy to Charles M. Schwab and the halcyon days of Bethlehem Steel...
Bloomsburg’s original town streets were laid out in 1802 by Ludwig and John Adam Eyer, confident that the location at a regional crossroads would guarantee growth. After a slow start the village grew rapidly in the latter half of the 19th century. A majority of the buildings in the Historic District date from that era, with a few earlier and a number of 20th-century buildings. Architectural styles are varied,from austere Federal to highly decorative Second Empire and Romanesque.
The “character” of the downtown is evoked chiefly by two- and three-story brick commercial buildings erected along Main Street before 1900. These buildings evidence a variety of 19th-century styles, but many of them have common features: narrow sash windows,ornamental brickwork, wrought-iron details, and prominent cornices (roof-line projections). The focal point of the downtown is the Market Square with its Civil War monument and Stroup Fountain.
The adjoining residential districts, particularly on Market Street and Fifth Street, display numerous attractive homes from the same era. Some of these are fairly grand but all were built as “livable” single-family homes. Several homes retain hitching-posts in front and/or small stables at the back, relics of the pre-automobile age when the homes were built.
In the 1980s the Town of Bloomsburg began a concerted effort to maintain and enhance its architectural heritage. The Town Council established a Historic District, roughly five blocks long and four wide. The Town also created a Historic Architectural Review Board to assess building-permit applications to ensure that the historic qualities of the District are preserved even in details such as the style of windows.
Our walking tour of Pennsylvania’s only incorporated town (other municipalities of this approximate size are generally boroughs) will begin at Market Square and radiate in every direction...
Bristol dates from 1681 and the arrival of Samuel Clift. To take legal possession of his grant of 262 acres from Governor Edmund Andros of New York, including today's town, Clift was required to start a "ferry against Burlington" and to maintain a public house. The town was named Buckingham and the county, in English tradition would be named for its new principle town: Buckinghamshire, shire being the county. The mouthful would soon be shortened to "Bucks."
The settlement composed primarily of Quakers grew around the ferry, and in 1697 residents petitioned the Provincial Council to establish the community as a market town. During the last half of the 18th century Bristol gained prominence as a ferry landing and a way station for the New York to Philadelphia stagecoach. Between the 1780s and the 1820s it became famous for its spa, as people flocked to Bath Springs to take the waters. The curative powers were touted by Dr. Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin - a golden endorsement in Colonial Philadelphia. A number of wealthy residents soon settled in the area and built large grand residences.
In 1832 a 60-mile canal was completed between Easton and Bristol, making the Delaware River navigable for barges floating anthracite coal out of the Pennsylvania mountains to the prime markets of Philadelphia and New York. The main railroad line connecting Philadelphia to New York arrived two years later and all the elements were in place for Bristol's economic growth. Even after an outlet to the river from the canal was opened upstream in New Hope allowing barges with the black gold to slip out the back door and onto the Delaware & Raritan Canal to New York City industrial progress did not abate. The first of the larger manufacturers was the Grundy Woolen Mill, which began production in 1876. Other mills followed with a variety of manufactured goods including wallpaper, ladies’ garments, patent leather, fringe and braids, cast iron products, woolen rugs and carpets, hosiery, woolen cloth and wooden products.
Bristol, the third oldest town in Pennsylvania and most important industrial town in Bucks County, continued churning out manufactured goods well into the 1900s but by the time the town celebrated its Tricentennial in 1981 it was ready to turn the page. The canal was decades closed and its lagoon by the Delaware River filled in and converted to a park. A railroad spur into town also was closed and converted into a park. The land that had contained the famous mineral spas was a shopping plaza. As it looked forward to its fourth century, Bristol reached back into its past and created an historic district in its downtown. More than 300 residential and commercial buildings qualified for inclusion, some dating back to the early 18th century.
Our walking tour will commence at the confluence of the old canal and the Delaware River where a large parking lot provides easy access to the town, just as the water did centuries ago...
Despite its relative nearness to New York City and Philadelphia, settlers did not penetrate these mountains and put down roots until 1802. Originally the city was called Ragged Island, then Barrendale. The true pioneers of the upper Lackawanna River Valley were brothers from Philadelphia, William and Maurice Wurts, who believed the anthracite (hard) coal they found in the region could produce cheap energy as well as the popular bituminous (soft) coal of the day. They staged a demonstration in New York City and found enough subscribers in their enterprise to send their “Black Gold” out of the Moosic Mountains to New York to form America’s first private million-dollar corporation.
By 1828 the Wurts’ Delaware and Hudson Canal Company had hand-dug and blasted a 108-mile canal from Honesdale to Kingston, New York, an engineering marvel that would ignite the growth of the region. In June 1831, the first underground Anthracite Coal mine in the United States was opened near the base of Seventh Avenue. Washington Irving, a famous author, and Philip Hone, founder of Honesdale, Pennsylvania have been credited by many with choosing the name of Carbondale, “carbon” meaning coal discovered here and “dale” meaning valley.
Still the coal had to be moved from Carbondale over the Moosic Mountains to the head of the canal in Honesdale. The Delaware & Hudson solved this problem by means of a “gravity railroad.’’ Cars loaded with coal were hauled up on tracks on a series of planes, or inclines, to the top of Farview by stationary steam engines, then lowered by gravity down planes on the other side to the town of Waymart, finally coasting on a steady downgrade into Honesdale. Empty cars were brought back to Waymart by horse or mule.
The city boomed. By 1851 Carbondale had over 5,000 citizens and was incorporated on March 15, 1851, making it the oldest (the “Pioneer”) city in Lackawanna County, PA, and the fourth oldest city (after Philadelphia, Lancaster, and York) in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Carbondale grew and prospered from the mining industry. Many Europeans from different backgrounds traveled to the New World in search of great opportunities and found it all here in Carbondale. Mining remained the chief economic source in the city until the late 1940s and early 1950s when light manufacturing became the new economic lifeblood of the community.
Our walking tour will begin at the site of a former grand train station near the world’s first underground anthracite coal mine where there is abundant parking...
With ties to George Washington, Molly Pitcher, the Civil War and even “America’s Greatest Athlete,” Jim Thorpe, for many years Carlisle billed itself as “America’s Most Historic Town.” The Carlisle Barracks, built in 1751, were George Washington’s choice for his army’s first arsenal and school. This Colonial ammunition plant was called Washingtonburg when it was constructed in 1776, the first place in America named for the general.
The Town of Carlisle was laid out and settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants in 1751 and became the center of their settlement in the Cumberland Valley. It was named after its sister town in Carlisle, England, and even built its former jailhouse to resemble Carlisle Citadel. The town was well-known at one time for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which trained Native Americans from all over the United States; one of its notable graduates was Thorpe, hero of the 1912 Olympics.
During the first half of the 20th century, the Carlisle Historic District was the hub of activity in the agricultural region located west of the Susquehanna River. Carlisle remained the largest town in Cumberland County during this period, with its population of 9,626 persons in 1900 swelling to 16,812 by 1950. It was a market town and legal and service center for the surrounding Cumberland Valley throughout the 20th century, as it had been in the past. Before 1930, two trolley lines and a passenger railroad, and after 1930, an extensive network of public roads connected the Carlisle Historic District with other communities in the region.
This walking tour will begin on Courthouse Square, an area known to George Washington when he worshipped here...
Clarion County was created as the 54th of Pennsylvania's 67 counties on March 11, 1839, from parts of Venango and Armstrong counties. The Clarion River was the dividing line between the two mother counties was in early times known as Stump Creek and Toby’s Creek. In 1817, the legislature passed an Act, authorizing the survey of a state road from Indiana to Franklin. The surveyors selected were David Lawson and Daniel Stannard. While lying in their tent one night, along Toby Creek, which was heavily fringed by a wall of close and massive timber, they noticed this wall condensed and reflected the murmur of the stream, giving it a silvery mellowness. Stannard remarked, “The water sounds like a distant clarion.” And so Pennsylvania got a name for a river, a county, and, a town.
Sometime in the fall of 1839, the town plot containing 200 acres, was surveyed by John Sloan, Jr. There were 275 in-lots and 50 out-lots. The public sale of the lots began October 30, 1839 and continued for three days. The highest price for a lot was $757.50 and the next in value was sold for $560.00.
The community was incorporated as a borough in 1841 and lay along the historic overland Susquehanna and Waterford Turnpike (later known as the Lakes-to-Sea Highway and now U.S. Route 322). Large stands of virgin timber provided the impetus for the first industry; later, local sand reserves helped make Clarion known as a producer of glass bottles. Clarion also prospered during the region’s oil boom f the 1860s and 1870s. Around that time the Carrier Seminary was established in Clarion; it eventually became Clarion University of Pennsylvania, and continues to be among the leading economic forces in the community.
Our walking tour will begin in a small park dedicated to America’s veterans, opposite the town’s most obvious landmark...
Zachariah Connell was already 65 years old when he laid out the town that would be his namesake in 1806. Connell was born in Virginia in 1741 and came to Fayette County after 1770 as a surveyor and land agent. He was known as an able and highly respected judge of land. Seeing this area as a natural stopping place for travelers who wanted to build rafts and float them down the river, Connell surveyed a tract of land on the east bank of the Youghiogheny River for himself containing 147 acres which he called “Mud Island.” The Bill for the Incorporation of Connellsville became law by The Act of Assembly passed March 1, 1806 and the founder died in 1813; he is buried on a hill overlooking East Francis Avenue.
For fifty years, Pennsylvania’s steel industry depended to an amazing extent on a skinny strip of land, scarcely two or three miles wide and about 50 miles long, called the Connellsville Coalfield. Here, a seven-foot-thick seam of the finest metallurgical coal in the world lay exposed and ready to burn. Connellsville coal was eighty-nine percent composed of carbon, a major source of heat, and sulphur, undesirable, made up only one percent. Actual coking of the coal, a process whereby the raw material was baked into a valuable industrial fuel in a beehive oven, was first tried near Connellsville in the 1840s. The first coal to be coked in an oven here was hauled from the Plumer mine, a local pit. The first successful beehive oven was built only 300 feet from the old stone house erected by Zachariah Connell. After the Civil War a beehive coke industry gained a foothold in the region.
One of the biggest players in the game was Henry Clay Frick, who would parlay the 200 beehive ovens he owned by the age of 24 in 1873 into one of the world’s greatest fortunes. In fact for a spell during the heyday of the coke days from the 1880s to the 1920s, Connellsville was said to have more millionaires per capita than any other place in the country. At its peak in 1913, the Connellsville district’s 38,000 ovens provided fully half the entire nation’s supply of metallurgical coke. It took 2,000 railcars each day to haul it away. Most of the coke was used in blast furnaces to smelt iron ore into molten pig iron, the raw material for steel.
The demand for coke pushed many other emerging industries out, making the city along with Fayette County almost entirely dependent on both coal and coke. When better heating processes were developed, Connellsville coke was no longer needed and the industry went bust ― along with the economy of Fayette County. A few ovens remain in operation at spots throughout the region, but the industry no longer belongs to Connellsville. The coal today goes into by-product ovens where every ingredient is captured and used.
Our walking tour will begin at the Carnegie Free Library, a gift from the man whose fantastic wealth sprang from what Connellsville gave him...
Doylestown is unique among prominent Pennsylvania towns. There is no water here to power industries; not even a mill. There is not a wealth of natural resources nearby. The railroad never rolled through town with the promise of progress. No important school was founded here to attract new residents. There were no great personal fortunes made here to spur economic growth.
The reason Doylestown is here today is because it was the exact spot where the Colonial road from the Schuylkill River at Swede’s Ford to the Delaware River at Coryell’s Ferry crossed the main road linking Philadelphia to Easton. In 20th century automobile-speak, it is where Route 202 crosses Route 611. To Delaware Valley traveler of the early 1700s, it was simply “the crossroads.” They met here to arrange transport of their goods; while they waited for the ferrymen they slept in their wagons and hoped for good weather.
In 1745 William Doyle obtained a license to build a tavern on the crossroads. Now weary road warriors could at least share a hot meal and a pint or two with other tradesmen and merchants before settling into their wagons for the night. Doyle’s Tavern was situated at what is presently the northwest corner of Main and State Streets and the second Doyle’s Tavern still stands at the crossroads.
A friendly tavern does not a town make. While a smattering of establishments grew up around the crossroads the village’s success was assured in 1813 when discontent with the location of the Bucks County seat in Newtown led to the selection of the more centrally located Doylestown as the county seat. Inns, public houses and shops followed and Doylestown evolved into the professional and residential character it retains today. The lawyers set up shop in existing houses or built new houses that doubled as offices. Even the buildings erected in downtown Doylestown as office buildings often don’t look like office buildings.
In the early 20th century, Doylestown became best known to the outside world through the museum of the Bucks County Historical Society, following Henry Mercer’s construction of the unusual reinforced concrete building in 1916 to house his collection of mechanical tools and utensils. Upon his death in 1930, Mercer also left his home, Fonthill, to be operated as a tile museum, which reinforced the community as a center for cultural attractions. Our walking tour will start at one, head for the other and take in Doylestown in between...
In 1736 Thomas Penn, son of William Penn, and Benjamin Eastburn, surveyor general, selected and surveyed the “Thousand Acre Tract” of land at the confluence of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. William Parsons and Nicholas Scull began their survey for a town in the 1750s at a spot called by the Indians “Lechanwitauk” or “the Place at the Forks.” The new town was to be called “Easton” in the new county of “Northampton.” The Great Square (now known as Centre Square) was, and remains, a gathering place for residents and travelers. In fact, on July 8,1776, the square was the site for one of only three readings of the Declaration of Independence. This historic event is celebrated each year on Heritage Day, when thousands gather to join in reenactments of the reading and to revel in entertainment, good food, and fireworks over the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers.
With the completion of the Lehigh Canal in 1829, the lands along the Lehigh River attracted great industrial development. The movement of the coal brought capital & investment to Easton. All along Canal Street was built one of the largest industrial manufacturing centers of America during the 1830s and 40s. Easton continued to prosper as a center for industry, manufacturing, commerce, and culture at the Forks of the Delaware and along the great rail lines.
The Easton Historic District is an example of a relatively intact Victorian commercial center. Although the District contains historically and architecturally significant buildings from almost all periods of its development, edifices completed between 1830 and 1910 dominate its streetscapes. This period saw Easton’s prosperity at its height, due to its position at the junction of three major canals and five important railroads.
The Easton Historic District is situated on a peninsula that is generally bounded by the Bushkill Creek to the north, the Delaware River to the east and the Lehigh River to the south. The western limits of the District are marked by the crest of a series of hills. The integrity of the Easton Historic District is highlighted by the fact that only twenty of its 425 buildings can be considered to be intrusioEastonns.
Our walking tour will start in Centre Square, laid out in a grid pattern by William Parsons at the center of the city. The square has been the site of a courthouse for over 100 years, the place of that historic public airing of the Declaration of Independence, the location of important Indian Councils during the French and Indian War and a farmers’ market that has been operating since 1791...
Erie was named after the Eriez tribe, which was destroyed by a combination of pestilence and the Seneca nation under Chief Cornplanter in the mid-seventeenth century. The first European settlers in the area were the French, who built Fort Presque Isle on the city’s site in 1753. The French abandoned the fort to the English, who lost it in 1763 at the start of Pontiac’s Rebellion. When General “Mad” Anthony Wayne induced the native tribes to make peace in 1794, the area was opened to settlement. The city was laid out in 1795 and became a port, engaged principally in the salt trade, in 1801. Erie became a borough in 1805, and was granted a city charter in 1851. The village of South Erie was incorporated as a borough in 1866, and was consolidated with Erie in 1870.
The city’s history throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by activity on the lake. During the War of 1812 Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry used a harbor on the east side of Presque Isle as a base of operations for the critical Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813. Most of the victoriousPerry’s ships were built in Erie. The fishing industry, which later gave Erie the name of being the largest fresh water fishing port in the world, began with the establishment of the Shaw Fish Company in 1821. The opening of the Erie and Pittsburgh Canal in 1844 brought a boom to business in the section; the canal did a profitable business for thirty years and lapsed quietly, despite the protests of the canal men, when the Erie and Pittsburgh Railroad bought it to eliminate competition.
Erie grew into the third largest third city in Pennsylvania (it is now fourth). The last decades of the 1800s brought a golden age to Erie. In 1885 Erie adopted the electric trolley system, being the second city in the United States to do so. By 1900 Erie had become nationally known for the manufacture of its engines and boilers, which were shipped to all parts of the world.
But the importance of the city and its port gradually diminished throughout the twentieth century as the development of automobiles, the railroad, and airplanes eroded the lake trade. In recent decades Erie has been the site of considerable renewal, developing the waterfront for resort activities, clearing buildings for parking lots to serve health care facilities and other projects.
Our walking tour will ignore the Great Lake that gives the city purpose altogether, starting six blocks away in the city’s central park that is dedicated to the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie...
Gettysburg grew on the site of a farm belonging to Samuel Gettys which was part of the Marsh Creek Settlement, an area first purchased from the Iroquois Indians by the family of William Penn. It was Samuel’s middle son, James, who purchased a 116-acre slice of the 381-acre farmstead and by 1786 he had laid out 210 lots around his home (at today’s Race Horse Alley Parking Plaza).
Gettys was not merely a land speculator. He had an active interest in community affairs and served as burgess, town clerk, sheriff, treasurer and a state legislator. During the War of 1812 he was a brigadier general in the local militia. On March 18, 1815, James Gettys died at the age of 56, within a week of the deaths of his mother and his wife.
By this time the town he founded was a thriving community; it became a crossroads town for the developing farms carved out by Scots-irish and German settlers. The bustling new town was selected as the Adams County seat in 1800 and by 1806, when Gettysburg incorporated as a borough, over 80 houses appeared on the tax rolls.
Gettysburg’s trajectory as a typical county seat and market town took a dramatic detour on July 1, 1863 when the Union Army of the Potomac, 92,000 men under General George Meade, clashed by chance with the invading Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, 70,000 troops led by General Robert E. Lee. Fighting raged for three days over 25 square miles around Gettysburg, culminating in a desperate Confederate charge across an open field into the center of the Union line under deadly fire. When the disastrous charge ended, the South’s ranks were shattered and the ultimate outcome of the Civil War was never in doubt again. Lee had pressed the attack onto Northern soil and had been repulsed. It was his last major offensive of the Civil War. More men fought and more men died at Gettysburg than in any battle before or since on North American soil.
The town survived the battle mostly intact. it wasn’t long before the agricultural economy sprinkled with light industry such as carriage- and wagon-making was humming again. But as important anniversaries of the battle ticked off over the years, veterans began returning and America’s most famous battlefield became speckled with 1,4000 monuments, statues and markers. The Gettysburg economy shifted to tourism. A century later, when departing President Dwight Eisenhower decided to settle in Gettysburg - the first house he had ever owned - people had another reason to come visit.
Our walking tour of what bills itself as “The Most Famous Small Town In America” will begin where Abraham Lincoln stepped off a train on November 18, 1863, arriving in Gettysburg to dedicate a national cemetery and say a few, a very few, words - only 256 in fact...
Following the Revolutionary War, an inn was built along a wagon trail (today’s East Pittsburgh Street) that stretched from Philadelphia west over the Appalachian Mountains to Fort Pitt, now Pittsburgh. A tiny settlement known as Newtown grew around the inn, today the intersection of Pittsburgh and Main streets.
After a raid by Guyasuta-led Seneca Indians accompanied by Canadian rangers burned Hannastown, the original Westmoreland County Seat north of Greensburg, in 1782, Newtown was tabbed as the new county seat. In 1799 when the settlement was formally incorporated it adopted the name of Greensburg, after Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Greene.
Even though Greensburg was one of the few settlements in a vast agricultural region and even though it had the second post office in southwestern Pennsylvania (after Pittsburgh), there was very little growth here in the first half of the 19th century. By 1850 the population tally stood at 1,051. But Greensburg won a station on the Pennsylvania Railroad main line in 1852 and that made all the difference.
When coal and coke exploded in the region it was shipped from Greensburg. In the early 1900s the City could count more than 25 coal operators and shippers with offices in downtown. Many of the workers who came to mine the coal lived in “patch towns” near the mines with limited facilities. When it came time to go to town for supplies, Greensburg is where they went. This wealth helped the town outstrip its neighbors in growth and sophistication. The difference is apparent when walking the streets of Greensburg, not only in the substance of the buildings but in the quality of materials.
Our walking tour of historic Greensburg will visit the marble and granite and cast iron on display along Main Street but first we’ll start in a piece of greenspace that was a cemetery at one time but no longer, save for one memorial that reads poignantly for an inscription that never came to pass: “The earthly remains of Arthur St. Clair are deposited beneath this humble monument which is erected to supply the place of a nobler one due from his country”...
Settlement in the area dates to 1732. In 1779 when Martin Kaercher, Jr. received 250 acres of fertile land from his father instead of tilling the ground by the banks of the Schuylkill River he laid out building lots. In 1787 the little settlement was known as Kaercher Stadt or Kaerchertown. In 1792 the northernmost town in Berks County became its second postal designation, following Reading a few months earlier.
The name “Hamburgh” was adopted from the town of Hamburg, Germany since many of the first inhabitants were Germanic, a dialect that still lingers here today. The town began to blossom following the construction of the Centre Turnpike in 1812 from Reading to Pottsville. (both towns approximately 15 miles from Hamburg). And with the opening of the Schuylkill Canal in 1820 and the railroad which came soon after, Hamburg boomed.
Hamburg Borough, was organized in 1837, and has been called, “without a doubt one of the finest towns - architecturally - to be found anywhere in the state. Hamburg experienced its growth spurt during a period in architecture when ornamentation was popular. Victorian style in the homes and businesses in the town of Hamburg reflected the pride and attention to detail of its inhabitants no matter what the cost. Look down North 4th Street, South 3rd Street or North 5th Street and you’ll find an abundance of ornate, Victorian cornices, gingerbread moldings, and brickwork - a tangible history of days gone by.
Our walking tour will begin at the Hamburg Public Library, one of the town buildings representative of the high style buildings that appeared during the Victorian Period...
Harrisburg has been an important transportation center since the days of riverboat traffic. In colonial days, John Harris operated a ferry at Harrisburg. Its western boundary is formed by the Susquehanna River. This location played an important part in its selection as the capital of Pennsylvania in 1812. Because of its location, Harrisburg played a large part in the early development of the Pennsylvania canal system and the subsequent development of the railroads, highways and airlines. Today, Harrisburg is one of the most important commercial centers and distribution points in the East.
At the turn of the 20th Century, spurred by the design of New York’s Central Park by the Frederick Olmsted, a nationwide conservancy effort began. In Harrisburg that movement was spearheaded by City natives J. Horace McFarland and Mira Lloyd Dock, who established Harrisburg’s League of Municipal Improvements. In 1901, their visionary efforts, collectively known and “The City Beautiful Movement,”established Harrisburg’s first official park system and saw to its expansion over the next decade to include Riverfront Park, Reservoir Park, City Island and what is today known as the Capital Area Greenbelt.
Since that time Harrisburg has gone through many transformations. By the early 1980s, Harrisburg’s once grand park system had become symbolic of the blighted city around it. Harrisburg was near bankruptcy and been declared the second most distressed city in the nation. The City’s parks were in a terrible state of repair and were widely misused for criminal activity. The 1982 election of reformist Mayor Stephen R. Reed changed everything for the City, especially the suffering parks system. The Mayor’s Parks Improvement Program was born and saw the investment of more than $29 million since 1984, a proverbial phoenix of greenery rising from the ashes of decades of neglect. New developers and preservationists have adhered to the program in the years since.
Our walking tour will start at the symbol of the Commonwealth, the State Capitol, a building President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed as “the most beautiful building he had ever seen” when he attended its dedication in 1906...
Only in the latter half of the eighteenth century did settlers from Connecticut get around to clearing the land in the wooded northern hills of Wayne County. Dyberry Forks, which was to become the county seat, was then just a swampy wilderness at the point where the Dyberry River joins the Lackawaxen on its way to the Delaware.
The town got started in the 1820s because of Maurice and William Wurts’s coal business. To get their anthracite coal from the mines in Carbondale to seaboard cities, they decided to build a canal from Dyberry Forks to Rondout (now Kingston), New York, on the Hudson River. That was only the second of their two problems - the coal wasn’t in Dyberry Forks - it was in Carbondale across 1,942-foot-high Farview Mountain. In 1825, backed by Philip Hone, a successful businessman turned mayor of New York, the Wurtses succeeded in raising over $1 million for their Delaware and Hudson Canal Company, and they were off.
By October 1828, Philip Hone, inspecting the newly completed D&H Canal, marveled at the ‘’stupendous stone work’’ and the impressive rock cuts - entirely achieved by men, mostly ‘’wild Irish’’ immigrants, wielding pick and shovel and the unpredictable black blasting powder of the day. The canal negotiated a drop of 1,030 feet by means of a series of more than 100 locks, in the 108-mile journey to Kingston.
Honesdale was incorporated in 1831. Its sole purpose was to serve as the jumping off point for canal barges loaded with coal headed for New York City markets. That coal came over the mountain from Carbondale on a ‘’gravity railroad’’ as loaded cars were hauled up on tracks on a series of planes, or inclines, to the top of Farview by stationary steam engines, then lowered by gravity down planes on the other side to the town of Waymart, finally coasting on a steady downgrade into Honesdale. Empty cars were brought back to Waymart by horse or mule. At one time Honesdale had the largest stockpile of coal in the world.
By the mid-19th century Honesdale was a bustling waterfront town; it became the county seat in 1841. Our walking tour will begin in the parking lot in the center of town in front of the Visitor Center, that was actually a boat basin once at the start of the historical canal...
One of the few founding fathers to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Federal Constitution, George Clymer was orphaned in 1740, only a year after his birth in Philadelphia. Apprenticed to the mercantile business by a wealthy uncle, he became a leading Colonial merchant after marrying his senior partner’s daughter, Elizabeth, in 1765.
Like many other contemporaries, Clymer also speculated in western lands, and donated the land upon which the town of Indiana was laid out in the early 1800s after the county was formed on March 30, 1803 from Westmoreland and Lycoming counties. Its name memorializes the first inhabitants.
The county’s first major industry was the manufacture of salt, made from evaporating salt water pumped from wells. The salt boom in the southwestern part of the county accounted for the name of the town of Saltsburg. Coal mining soon rivaled farming as the backbone of the region’s economy.
Today, Indiana is known for two things that are indispensable at Christmas time: the Christmas tree and Jimmy Stewart. It seems that growing pines and spruces as a farm crop started in Indiana County in 1918. In 1944 a group of growers organized the Pennsylvania Christmas Tree Growers Association and by the 1950s an estimated 700,000 trees were being cut each year around Indiana. An Associated Press news story tagged Indiana County as the “Christmas Tree Capital of the World,” a title it guards ferociously. Shortly after Indiana began receiving nationwide publicity the state of Washington tried to appropriate the title and an Indiana nurseryman produced an order he had for 15,000 trees to be shipped to Tacoma, Washington.
James Maitland Stewart was born in his parent’s home at 975 Philadelphia Street in Indiana on May 20, 1908. The Stewarts trace their roots in Indiana County back to 1772 when Jimmy’s third great-grandfather Fergus Moorhead first arrived and was captured by Indians. The Stewart family hardware store, known locally as the “big warehouse,” was a fixture in Indiana since 1848. After experiencing an All-American childhood in Indiana (he was an enthusiastic Boy Scout) that imbued him with the values that would later show up on the silver screen, Jimmy Stewart left for his father’s alma mater, Princeton University, in 1928. His on-stage performances attracted enough attention that he would not return after school to take up business in the family store.
Jimmy Stewart never forgot his roots In town and our walking tour will begin at a life-size statue that the actor himself dedicated on the occasion of his 75th birthday...
In 1791 Philip Ginder went digging at Summit Hill to cut a millstone and found himself picking through underlying black rock. He took some of it to a local blacksmith to see if it would burn. When it did he also gave a sample to Colonel Jacob Weiss who took it to Philadelphia for analysis. The rock was anthracite and Weiss formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company in 1792 to purchase some 10,000 acres of land in around Summit Hill. It’s one thing to own a mountain of coal, it is, however, quite another to do anything with it. At the time it was difficult to find a good road from city to city, let alone from the mountains of northeast Pennsylvania. And even if there was easy transportation, people were only using soft coal - there was no market for hard coal.
That changed during the war of 1812 and once there was a market for hard coal there had to be a supply. Josiah White devised a canal system that released needed freshets of water to float barges on the shallow parts of the Lehigh River and Mauch Chunk, an Indian word roughly translating to “Bear Mountain,” was founded in 1820. In 1828 coal excavated from the mines on Summit Hill began starting their ingenious journey to Philadelphia markets on America’s first gravity railroad. Gravity took unpowered wooden coal cars down a switchbacking rail into the town to meet barges on the Lehigh. Meanwhile, mules hauled the empty cars back up the mountain on a parallel track for the next load.
Steam power eventually replaced the mules but the gravity railroad lasted until 1933 - its final years spent as one of America’s first rollercoasters and a popular tourist destination for thrill seekers. Today it is a recreational hiker-biker trail.
Even though it was a coal town, Mauch Chunk entrepreneurs saw the value of their breathtaking mountain setting from an early date. In 1824, when there were only 19 log buildings in town, construction began on the Mansion House on Susquehanna Street, touted as America’s largest hotel. Within a decade the Broadway House and White Swan hotels would open and soon Mauch Chunk was billing itself as “America’s Switzerland.”
A fire swept through town in 1849, destroying most of the vernacular building stock. Mauch Chunk, by now flush with coal cash, went on a rebuilding spree that would last through the rest of the century. And that would be it for building in Mauch Chunk. The coal industry collapsed in the early 1900s and the coming of the automobile brought other, more fashionable, mountain resorts into easy reach. The town’s fortunes spiraled downhill - fast. An odd bargain to house the remains of Jim Thorpe, the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century, in exchange for renaming the town united Mauch Chunk with East Mauch Chunk in 1954 but never attracted the anticipated tourists.
It would be another generation before those tourists rediscovered the charms of Mauch Chunk and our walking tour will follow the narrow streets that have seen scarcely a modern intrusion since the coal boom days ended so many years ago...
Johnstown is best known for the flood that decimated the town on May 31, 1889 that killed 2,209 people in one of the country’s greatest calamities. What is lesser known is that Johnstown has been visited twice more by great, rampaging waters - a flood in 1936 that caused significantly more property damage and in 1977 when relentless rains brought five times as much - 128 million gallons - water into the city.
Around the floods Johnstown was a prosperous and hard-working mill town. The Pennsylvania Canal reached Johnstown in 1830 and the Pennsylvania Railroad arrived in 1854, two years after the Cambria Iron Company was founded in the Conemaugh Valley. The Cambria Iron Company of Johnstown was the greatest of the early modern iron and steel works, a forerunner of Bethlehem Steel Company and the United States Steel Corporation. It was the site of several major technological innovations that were copied throughout the world, including early use of the Bessemer process for refining steel and many new methods of heating, handling and rolling steel.
As Cambria became one of the nation’s largest iron and steel producers it employed as many as 7,000 workers. The wealth spilled into Johnstown - by 1901 there were enough shoppers to support 11 department stores in the downtown area. The most modern buildings of the day, many that still line the Johnstown streets, were erected to replace ones destroyed in the Great Flood of 1889.
Those streets look remarkably what founder Joseph Schantz (Johns), envisioned when he plotted and planned the first permanent settlement in 1800. An Amish farmer, Schantz arrived in Philadelphia from Switzerland in 1769 and set his sights westward. During his life-time he used the name “Schantz” (Johns) on most of his land deeds and “Jantzin” (Johnson) in his family Bible records. In 1793 Johns bought a tract of land between the Conemaugh and Stonycreek rivers, built a cabin, cleared some land and began to farm.
Anticipating the creation of a new county (Cambria County in 1804), Joseph Johns hoped that his land would be chosen as the county seat. With this in mind, he laid out the first village lots and streets in 1800. He called his settlement “Conemaugh Old Town.”
Our walking tour historic downtown Johnstown will begin in Central Park, a greenspace that remains the same public space as it was in 1800 when it was so designated by town founder Joseph Johns...
The name Kennett originates with Francis Smith who came to this region in 1686. He was a native of Devizes, in Wiltshire, England, in which there is a village called “Kennet.” The name is first mentioned in court records in 1705. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Kennett was a small village located where the road from Chester to Baltimore intersected with the road from Lancaster to Wilmington. It was at this intersection that the Unicorn Tavern was built in 1735 by Joseph Musgrave, the largest landowner in what is now Kennett Square. In 1776 Musgrave sold his property to Colonel Joseph Shippen, the uncle of Peggy Shippen, who became the wife of Benedict Arnold.
Travelers found the village a good place to stop, including Baron Wilhelm van Knyphausen and General Sir William Howe, who stayed for one night before marching to the Battle of the Brandywine against George Washington at Chadds Ford in 1777. By 1810 there was a village of about eight dwellings, five of which were log, but it was not until 1853 that a group of citizens petitioned the Court of Quarter Sessions of Chester to form a borough. After several petitions and objections from farmers, the court granted the articles of incorporation and Kennett Square held its first local elections in 1855.
Antebellum Kennett was an important region in the Underground Railroad, and many prominent citizens of Kennett Square and the surrounding region played an important role in securing freedom for runaway slaves.
It was in Kennett Square that the grain drill was invented by Samuel and Moses Pennock (patented on March 12, 1841), and improvements for the corn sheller and harvester (1857), and the first four-wheel road machine (1877). Their business, S & M Pennock & Sons, eventually grew into the American Road Machinery Company. Other local inventors included James Green, inventor of a hayknife, Bernard Wiley, inventor of the famous Wiley Plow, John Chambers, inventor of the asbestos stove plate, and Cyrus Chambers, who patented a machine for folding papers and a brickmaking machine. It was on the Chamber’s property that the first circular saw in Chester County was built in 1835. Another large business was the Fibre Specialty Manufacturing Company, later known as NVF, which built its first plant in Kennett Square in 1898 as is now closed.
Kennett Square’s most famous citizen was Bayard Taylor (1825-1878). A resident of Kennett Square, this nineteenth-century author, diplomat, poet, and journalist published over forty books, including Views A-foot, Eldorado, a translation of Faust (which Mark Twain called the best of all English translations), and local favorite, The Story of Kennett. Bayard Taylor died in Berlin while serving as Minister to Germany.
Our walking tour will start one block north of the Town center at State Street and Union Street where there is a municipal parking garage...
Most of the land that would become the City of Lancaster was owned by Andrew Hamilton. The settlement here was known as “Hickory Town” and dated to 1709. Andrew’s son James was deeded 500 acres of this land in 1733, and designed the layout of the city in a plan of straight streets and rectangular property lots. Lancaster thus became the first inland city in the United States. Still very much linking to England, the new town adopted the symbol of the red rose from the mother country. The town became a borough in 1742 and a chartered city in 1818.
During the Revolutionary War, Lancaster was an important munitions center, and when the British captured Philadelphia the Continental Congress headed here, the largest inland city in America at the time. The Congress only stayed a day, however, September 27, 1777, before moving on to York where they could put the Susquehanna River between them and the British.
The colonial city owed its early prosperity to its strategic position at a transportation crossroads. After the American Revolution, the city of Lancaster became an iron-foundry center. Two of the most common products needed by pioneers to settle the Frontier were manufactured in Lancaster: the Conestoga wagon and the Pennsylvania long rifle. The Conestoga wagon was named after the Conestoga River, which runs through the city.
In 1795 the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike opened, linking the two cities. It was considered the first engineered long-distance road in the United States, designed by Scottish engineer John Loudon MacAdam. It became the first paved road in the country and later a link in the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road.
Our walking tour will head right down that historic road in the center of Lancaster, starting in a town square that existed in the original platting of the town as “Centre Square” but is known today as Penn Square...
Originally occupied by Algonquin Indian Tribes, the Lebanon Valley was part of a 1681 land-grant by King Charles II of England to William Penn. Pennsylvania was described as a place to go for religious sovereignty and inexpensive land. First settled in 1723, Lebanon County’s initial colonists, prior to 1720, were Scotch-Irish. By 1729, the predominant settlers were German. Some worked as missionaries and others seeking religious freedom came for the land.
The Lebanon Valley went through a terrible period during the French-Indian War. Forts were constructed in an attempt to stop attacks, but Indian attacks continued until 1763. The Revolutionary War was significant in Lebanon history as well. British and Hessian prisoners were held captive in the region and worked for the Cornwall Furnace, making cannons and munitions.
By 1790, most of the German settlers who had immigrated to Lebanon County for religious freedom, were of the middle class. These Germans became known as the Pennsylvania Dutch, and they included such groups as the Mennonites, the Dunkers, the German Reformed, the Lutherans and Moravians. The Pennsylvania Dutch built farming communities and churches, bringing ministers and educators to the community. These people and their way of life had a great influence on the industry, farming, religion and other qualities of life that Lebanon knows today.
George Steitz is given credit for laying out the present city of Lebanon in the 1740s. The town was located in what was then Lebanon Township in Lancaster County and was commonly called Steitz Town or Steiza, after its proprietor. The village was renamed Lebanon in 1758 and became the county seat when Lebanon County was created by an Act of Assembly in 1813 from portions of Dauphin and Lancaster Counties. Lebanon received its charter as a borough in 1821 and as a city in 1885.
Our walking tour will begin at the former Market Square at Cumberland Street and Ninth Street where you find free parking in the municipal lot...
Lewisburg was founded in 1784 by Ludwig Derr, a settler in the area since the 1760s. Derr had purchased several tracts of land from the family of William Penn and other neighboring land owners; the largest of which was known as “The Prescott.” In 1783, he worked with Samuel Weiser (son of Conrad Weiser, the famous Indian liaison who died in 1760, and with whose family Derr’s own paternal family had been friends) to layout his combined land tracts, and create Derrstown.
The name was later, after Derr’s death, changed to Lewisburg. Much has been considered regarding‘how’ the name changed from Derrstown to Lewisburg. The most likely truth is that Derr’s first name “Ludwig” translated into English as “Louis” but, being of German decent, it was spelled “Lewis.” Later, after Derr’s death, the traditional Germanic “burg” was appended to his first name to create Lewisburg.
The street names that run east and west are a local urban mystery. St. George, St. Catherine, and St. Louis etc...they appear to be named for Saints. However, since Derr was a Lutheran and did not pay homage to Catholic saints, this is unlikely. Rather, the street names are more likely named for Derr’s family members, as those streets are consecutively parallel, and emanate from what was then Derr’s home.
Another mystery surrounding Lewisburg, is the disappearance of its founder, Ludwig Derr. After selling many lots of land, Derr set off for Philadelphia to sell additional lots. Shortly after arriving, records indicate some of his lots had sold. However, Ludwig Derr simply disappears from history in that city. Derr’s son George went to Philadelphia to search for his father, but returned a short time later knowing nothing more than when he set out.
Over the centuries, Lewisburg has been a center of commerce in Union County. Its tributary off of the Susquehanna River was used for logging and shipping, and remains of old factories and other ancient stone structures exist along the river banks. The town’s most famous landmark are its three-globe streetlights. Installation of the cast iron standards began in 1912 when Market Street was being paved with brick. Today approximately 1,500 of these lights line Lewisburg’s streets. The standards are made by the nearby Watsontown Foundry and wired by Citizen Electric.
Our walking tour will begin five blocks away from the Susquehanna River in Hufnagel Park and head down Market Street towards the water...
During the French and Indian War, British General John Forbes was assigned the daunting task of seizing Fort Duquesne, the French citadel at the forks of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers. He ordered construction of a new road across Pennsylvania, guarded by a chain of fortifications, the final link being the “Post at Loyalhanna,” fifty miles from his objective, to serve as a supply depot and staging area for a British-American army of 5000 troops. The fort was constructed in September 1758 about the time the British were repulsed in an attack at Fort Duquesne. After a successful defense of Loyalhanna from a French attack on October 12 the heavily outnumbered French abandoned the post, which Forbes occupied on November 25. He designated the site “Pittsburgh” in honor of Secretary of State William Pitt. Forbes also named Loyalhanna “Fort Ligonier” after his superior, Sir John Ligonier, commander in chief in Great Britain. There are two other sites in America that honor the grizzled warrior who was made the Earl of Ligonier in 1766 at the age of 87, four years before his death. One is a small bay on Lake Champlain and the other a town in Indiana that was founded by a pioneer from the Ligonier Valley.
The town of Ligonier was laid out by Colonel John Ramsey in 1817. He rode out fromChambersburg to build a mill on his newly acquired 672 acres of land on the north bank of the Loyalhanna Creek. When the borough was incorporated in 1834, a descendent changed the name of Ramseytown to the more exotic “Ligonier.” Perhaps he was anticipating attracting vacationing tourists in the future. He certainly anticipated the town becoming the most important in the area, designing it round a central diamond awaiting a county courthouse. The designation as a county seat never came but the tourists did and Ligonier has been a resort destination for Pittsburghers since the 1800s.
But growth came slowly, it was non-existent for a time, in fact. In its early days Ligonier was a welcome stop for stagecoach and commercial wagon traffic between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But in 1952 the Pennsylvania Railroad was completed across the state and it ran not through Ligonier but Latrobe ten miles away The population of Ligonier actually declined from 350 people in 1860 to 317 in 1870.
It would not be until 1878 that the Judge Thomas Mellon, scion of what was to become one of the 20th century’s greatest family fortunes, completed a 10-mile feeder line with the Ligonier Valley Railroad that fortunes reversed. But even though town businesses now had an outlet for their goods, Ligonier’s character remained less commercial than some of its more advanced neighbors. Its reputation as a summer excursion destination was assured in the 1890s when the Mellons developed Idlewild, a picnicking park that is considered the nation’s third oldest amusement park still in operation today. Not coincidentally, Idlewild Ligonierwas sited directly on the Ligonier Valley Railroad right-of-way.
When the Lincoln Highway, America’s first paved transcontinental road, rolled through Ligonier in 1919 it brought more tourists, not industry. Our walking tour will explore the remnants of that historic road that is now the town’s Main Street...
David Mead, Connecticut-born in 1752, was the pioneer to the waters of the French Creek, following land claims from his native colony through the Wyoming lands of northeast Pennsylvania to these lands of the Iroquois Indians where Chief Custaloga had built a village known as Cussewago. Mead led a small band of settlers that included his brothers, their wives and families and optimistically laid out the original town plat in 1792 in the face of looming Indian hostilities. But by the next year he had sold a few lots and Meadville was off and running.
In 1800, the Pennsylvania counties of Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Crawford, Erie, Mercer, Warren and Venango were cleaved from a part of Allegheny County. The population of Crawford County was then 2,346. Owing to the sparse population of the new counties, Erie, Mercer, Warren and Venango were included in the Crawford County District with the courts of justice located in Meadville. By the mid nineteenth century, Meadville was the most prominent and elegant community in this part of Pennsylvania. It had a reputation for education (Allegheny College was the second school west of the Allegheny Mountains when it was established in 1815), religion (the Meadville Theological School was a minister-generator for the Unitarian church), and law (the town was the birthplace of the direct primary system of elections in the United States).
The big boost for commerce arrived with the Atlantic and Great Western Railway of Pennsylvania (now the Erie Railroad) in October 1862. With Meadville practically half way between New York and Chicago, the railroad opened a wide area of markets to the farms and industries of Crawford County. Meadville was also well-positioned as the gateway town to the new oil boom that came with Edwin Drake’s new oil wells in the region in 1859. With its already well-established base, Meadville enjoyed the boom without crashing in the bust of the oil days.
Meadville’s 20th century notoriety began in Chicago in 1893 when Whitcomb L. Judson invented the hookless fastener. Meadville’s Lewis Walker moved the enterprise back to Pennsylvania where Gideon Sundback invented the fastener used everywhere today. It was not a money-maker, however, until 1923 when the B.F. Goodrich Company used it on a new line of rubber galoshes. The new shoes were called Zippers - the galoshes forgotten today but not so their little metal fastener. Meadville became known as the “Zipper Capital of the World.”
Our walking tour will visit commercial, residential, ecclesiastical and governmental sites all fastened together by Diamond Park, still a public use green area as planned more than 200 years ago, and where our explorations will commence...
After receiving the colony of Pennsylvania from England’s King Charles II in 1681, William Penn sold a parcel of land to Thomas Minshall, who emigrated from England in 1702. Minshall’s farming land was set up outside the town limits of the Village of Providence, which contained a blacksmith, wheelwright, stables, outbuildings, and a few small houses and farmland areas.
The community name derives from Latin for “middle,” because of its location in the center of Delaware County. It is also situated at the highest point in Delaware County and approximately 12 miles from Philadelphia. Over time, there was a growing public demand for the county seat to be relocated from its southern location in Chester to a more central site. In response, the Borough of Media was incorporated by a special Act of Assembly in 1850, and the Greek Revival courthouse was completed the next year.
The beauty and healthfulness of Media, the picturesque surrounding hills and valleys, the fact that the sale of liquor was prohibited in the borough from the start, and its easy accessibility from Philadelphia caused many people to seek summer homes in the town. For those just looking for a respite from the city there were spacious “country houses” that took on guests.
In this tradition of recreation and leisure our walking tour will begin at the Media Theatre on State Street in the eastern end of town...
In 1798, John Carlysle Stewart, a civil engineer, traveled to western Pennsylvania to resurvey the “donation lands” granted by the government to revolutionary war veterans. In the course of performing his task, he discovered that the original survey forgot to stake out 50 acres at the confluence of the Shenango River and Neshannock Creek. Stewart claimed it for himself.
Stewart laid out the town of New Castle, named for his hometown in Delaware, in April of 1798; the town became a became a borough in 1825, having a population of about 300. Business began to flourish with the construction of the canal system which made its way through the city. Numerous manufacturing plants located in New Castle because of the availability of transportation facilities and ready access to raw material markets. The canal system was later supplemented and then replaced by the railroad system which offered greater speed and capacity for freight as well as year round service.
In the 1870s, the city became a major hub of the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad and by 1900 was one of the fastest growing cities in the country as it became the tin plate capital of the world - the population swelled from 11,600 in 1890 to 28,339 in 1900, and to 38,280 in 1910, as immigrants flocked to the city to work in the mills. Steel and paper mills, foundries, a bronze bushing factory, and car-construction plants contributed to the economy. In addition, the Shenango China produced commercial china and created fine china for the White House, including dinnerware for Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson.
New Castle has been known for decades as the Fireworks Capital of America; it is home to Zambelli Fireworks, the largest manufacturer and exhibitor of fireworks today. Our walking tour will begin at Zambelli Plaza that has been designed to be a focal point of downtown New Castle where the two major roads of East Washington and Mill streets join and a fireworks sculpture illuminates the night...
When William Penn was granted all the land west of New Jersey, north of Maryland and south of New York by King Charles II as payment of a debt owed his father, he had big plans for his vast new empire. One was to establish several townsaround Philadelphia to provide country homes for city residents and to support farming communities. So, the story goes that he traveled north from his “great town” in 1682 and stopped in the middle of some trees that bordered a creek flowing to the Delaware River to proclaim, “This is where I propose to build my ‘new town.’ “
Straddling what is now called Newtown Creek, the site included 640 acres. In time, the name was shortened to Newtown. Penn’s plan included 16 farm plots that fanned out from a common in the middle of 30-40 acres. Each farm lot was connected to the common by a townstead lot so settlers could be integrally connected to the going-on in town.
The small village became the Bucks County seat of government in 1725 and many substantial Colonial residences and taverns followed. Its central location made it an important supply depot during the American Revolution and General George Washington made his headquarters in Newtown from December 24-30, 1776. From this location, Washington marched his army into American legend on Christmas Eve to cross the Delaware and surprise a Hessian army in Trenton.
The county government left for Doylestown in 1813 and Newtown settled into a residential existence. Gradually the heritage farms gave way to houses and the borough was enlarged four times beginning in 1838. All the while the core of town in Penn’s original common resisted the overtures of modernization. The Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places with many of its buildings well into their third century of use.
Our walking tour of the Colonial shops and taverns and houses will begin at a relative newcomer to Newtown - the Friends Meetinghouse. Oddly for a town founded by William Penn it didn’t get it own meetinghouse for 130 years. Local Quakers were instead members of the Falls or Middletown or Wrightstown Meetings, forced to travel considerable distances to worship...
There was nothing organic about the birth of Norristown. In 1784, Montgomery County was created out of Philadelphia County by an act of the Commonwealth. A 27 1/2 acre parcel in what is now Norristown Borough was stipulated to be purchased for the new county’s seat of government, making it one of the earliest established in Pennsylvania. It took the name of an ancient landowner in the area, Isaac Norris. Norris had been mayor of Philadelphia 60 years earlier - Ben Franklin had just gotten to town and George Washington wasn’t even born yet. Norris himself was born in England in 1871 - and thus may be the oldest person for whom a Pennsylvania town is named.
Norristown was not destined to be a sleepy government town. Water power draining into the Schuylkill River along the Stoney Creek and Saw Mill Run encouraged early industry and Norristown was superbly sited to take advantage of early American transportation. The Schuylkill Canal was completed in 1826 and the Reading Railroad arrived in 1834. Horse drawn trolley cars ran through town by the 1880s and Norristown had some of the earliest electrified trolley lines in America. When the Philadelphia and Western electrified high speed line was constructed in 1912, Norristown was in easy commuting distance of Philadelphia, 20 miles away. It was heady enough for borough boosters to proclaim in Centennial literature that year that, “Norristown is now the biggest, busiest, brightest Borough in the world.”
Now on the eve of the centennial of that Centennial proclamation, our walking tour will investigate how that boast holds up, beginning at the county court house at the heart of the Norristown Central Historic District...
Philadelphia - Benjamin Franklin Parkway
The model for Benjamin Franklin Parkway is the Champs Elysees in Paris, France ― a wide, pastoral avenue connecting City Hall to the world’s largest municipal park, Fairmount Park. It did not come easy. When formal planning got underway prior to World War I there was a mass of buildings between there and there.
The designers of the Parkway were Paul Cret and Jacques Greber and the mass removal of those buildings - and the displacing of the people who lived in them - was a startlingly bold stroke for a conservative city often accused of preferring to live in the days of the Founding Fathers. By 1919 a stretch of Parkway could be seen and within a decade fountains, small parks, statues and monuments and formal public buildings began to take their place on the Parkway. By 1935 the Franklin Institute, the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the head of the avenue, and the Rodin Museum could be seen along the mile-long parkway.
Our walking tour will begin in the heart of Center City and head out along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway...
When William Penn founded Philadelphia in 1682 he saw a city that would one day stretch from the Delaware River to the Schuylkill River. He had surveyor Thomas Holme lay out a plan for the city to match that far-reaching vision. For the next 100 years the city still clustered only six blocks from the Delaware River.
By the early nineteenth century, development had reached Center Square (now site of City Hall) and continued westward to the Schuylkill and beyond into West Philadelphia. Things were happening so rapidly that the Consolidation of 1854 recognized this fact by enlarging the city boundaries to match those of Philadelphia County.
The city’s banks and businesses and small manufacturers marched westward as the city grew. By 1900 Center City claimed not only Philadelphia’s government and moneyed interests but its railroads and great retail emporiums. Center City today continues to be the pulsing heart of the city with America’s most formidable historical district to the east and majestic residential neighborhoods to the west.
Our walking tour will begin at one of America’s most magnificent buildings recently restored...
Germantown was founded in 1683 by a group of Netherlanders fleeing religious persecution. Francis Daniel Pastorius, rose to leadership, contacted William Penn, obtained land, and directly stimulated migration. Pastorius arrived on August 20 of that year, the other settlers reached Philadelphia on October 6. Germantown remained predominantly Dutch until 1709, when large numbers. of Germans began to settle there. Those immigrants overwhelmed the settlement and gave it a decidedly Germanic character for most of the 18th century.
The town grew rapidly. William Rittenhouse founded America’s first paper mill on the Wissahickon Creek in 1690 and it was followed by textile mills and tanning yards. By 1758 some 350 houses stood in town, most of them occupied by Germans. The community was important enough to attract the attention of British General Sir William Howe who, after embarrassing the Americans at the Battle of Brandywine in the American Revolution in 1777, took a circuitous westerly route to occupy Germantown before marching on Philadelphia. General George Washington staged a bold counterattack on the British along today’s Germantown Avenue and, although denied a great victory, infused his battered troops with critical confidence.
George Washington would return to Germantown after the war, this time as President of the United States. In 1793, when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital, a Yellow Fever epidemic drove the government away from the foul air of the city and set up shop in Germantown. President Washington would come back the following summer to escape the heat of the city and establishing America’s first “summer White House.”
Germantown remained independent until 1854 when it was absorbed by the city of Philadelphia. Five years later the street car ran from downtown up Germantown Avenue to the 6700 block, providing an immediate and lasting effect upon the commercial nature of “Main Street.” Despite the influx of shops and services, Germantown Avenue retained much of its mixed usage of churches, residences and schools. In 1965 the Colonial Germantown Historic District was designated a National Historic Landmark and many of its historical sites have been well preserved.
Our walking tour will take place entirely on Germantown Avenue that started as an Indian path and was enlarged into a road into the interior of young Pennsylvania. The thoroughfare boasts an unbroken 300+-year heritage of residential and commercial use. We will begin in Market Square that was the center of the British line during the Battle of Germantown...
William Penn envisaged a beautiful waterfront for his city ― something similar to the embankment in London, but this was not to be. Instead, the area quickly became a scene of great commercial activity, stuffed with bustling wharves, warehouses, and boisterous taverns. The district is the oldest and most historic in the city, for it was from the banks of the Delaware that Philadelphia grew westward toward the Schuylkill River.
Construction was started on Independence Hall in 1732, only fifty years after the founding of the city by William Penn. At the time, the area between 5th and 6th Streets, where the most ambitious building ever planned in the American colonies was being built, was still on the edge of things. Forty years later, when events leading to a declaration of independence by a gathering of rebels made this the birthplace of America, the city had grown as far as 8th Street. The port was thriving but the streets were still unpaved.
There were dwellings in Old City ― Elfreth’s Alley and Loxley Court attest to that ― but they were modest homes in contrast to the larger ones to be seen in Society Hill. By the 1960s Old City had long ago ceased to be the city’s pulsing financial center. Manufacturers had departed as well. Cheaper rents now again attracted artisans and craftspeople. The spacious 19th century buildings offered a perfect locale for contemporary art galleries and stores offering the fine crafts of this new population ― particularly furniture. Today, Old City is home to more than 30 galleries interwoven in the historic district.
This walking tour will start at Philadelphia’s number one tourist attraction - at the south end of Independence Mall where the Liberty Bell stands opposite Independence Hall...
Philadelphia - Rittenhouse Square
Rittenhouse Square, one of William Penn’s original five squares, was known as the southwest square until 1825 when it was named for the astronomer-clockmaker, David Rittenhouse, a man of multiple talents and descendent of William Rittenhouse, who built the first paper mill in America in Germantown. David Rittenhouse served in the General Assembly and at the State Constitutional Convention. His survey of the Maryland-Pennsylvania boundary in 1763-64, to settle a dispute between the Penns and Lord Baltimore, was so accurate it was accepted and followed by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon when they surveyed the “line” between north and south for which they are still remembered. Rittenhouse taught astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania and invented the collimating telescope; he was also president of the American Philosophical Society and the first director of the United States Mint.
Rittenhouse Square has always denoted quality. The first house facing the Square was erected in 1840. During its next century the Square kept its residential quality. In 1913, the architect Paul Cret, who was one of the men responsible for Benjamin Franklin Parkway and many of its buildings, did much of the work to beautify the Square. Cooperative apartments and condominiums have replaced private mansions on the Square over the last three decades while the immediate surrounding streets serve up a microcosm of all Philadelphia has to offer. Within easy walking distance are eclectic shopping boutiques, world-class restaurants, the skyscrapers of the city’s business community, the cultural resonance of unique museums and galleries and, to the south and east, some of America’s most charming big city residential streets.
Our walking tour will begin strolling the leafy walkways that crisscross the plaza of Philadelphia’s most desirable address...
The Free Society of Traders, a stock company that invested in William Penn’s Pennsylvania colony, set up shop on Dock Creek (later filled in and called Dock Street) in 1682 to oversee their new assets which soon included a sawmill, a glasshouse and a tannery in the the new settlement of Philadelphia. The Society barely saw the 1700s before it went bankrupt and disappeared. It is this long-gone stock company for which Society Hill is named. Hard by the river and the new government, it was the most valuable land in the city. Speculators hungry to cash in chopped up their building lots into ever smaller parcels, leaving smallish alleys that epitomize Colonial America.
By the mid 1900s Society Hill had lost its cachet and spiraled into a disheveled slum area. Meanwhile the City was adopting an urban renewal plan that called for every building constructed after 1840 to be swept away from the streets andeverything built earlier would be saved and rehabilitated. About 600 Georgian and Federal buildings were renovated but countless Victorian buildings that gave the neighborhood spice were lost forever. And any new buildings would come on line with the same Colonial brick appearance.
Society Hill is loosely defined as the land between the Delaware River and Washington Square, bounded by Walnut Street to the North and Lombard Street to the South. Our walking tour of Society Hill will begin on the waterfront in Penn’s Landing which has been severed from Society Hill by I-95 but where parking is plentiful...
One of the first Europeans to arrive in what would become Phoenixville was attorney Charles Pickering who sailed to America with colony founder William Penn. While Penn sought religious freedom for his fellow Quakers, Pickering sought financial opportunity in “Penn’s Woods.” He obtained a large tract of land around the creek that now bears his name and began silver mining operations. His silver ore was found to be worthless by inspectors back in England. Pickering’s financial affairs spiraled downward and he was eventually imprisoned for counterfeiting.
A few years later, a Moses Coates and his friend James Starr purchased a strip of land along the French Creek within the present boundaries of the borough. The entire 1000 acres of forest had been deeded to Chester County political figure David Lloyd, who called it the “Manavon Tract” after his birthplace in Great Britain. Starr cleared his portion of the land for agriculture and built a grist mill around which a little village grew.
After the Revolutionary War a small mill was built to make nails. It was to be the precursor of Phoenix Steel. The town was renamed Phoenixville, because the Foundry’s molten metal reminded the manager of the fabled bird that died and rose from its ashes. During the first half of the 19th century, the iron industry expanded enormously, growing from a few small rolling and slitting mills to several larger blast furnaces and finishing mills. With the completion of the Chester County Canal in 1828 and the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad in 1837 ironmasters gained easier access to raw materials and more efficient transportation of finished products. After the mid-nineteenth century Phoenix Iron and Steel became the largest iron and steel producer in Chester County, and one of the largest in southeast Pennsylvania. By 1881 Phoenix Iron Company used 60,000 tons of ore annually in the blast furnaces to produce 30,000 tons of pig iron, and employed 1,500 men.
Our walking tour will start in Reeves Park, a greenspace donated by David Reeves, founder and president of the Phoenix Iron Works, the economic engine that drove Phoenixville through its development years...
Pittsburgh - Business District
The Pittsburgh streetscape is the mirror image of its fellow urban pillar of the Commonwealth, Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, city planners made the decision to knock down most of the its building stock that came after the 1840s to promote a Colonial appearance. In Pittsburgh the city planning was dome by a fire that ignited on the southeast corner of Ferry and Second streets at noon on April 10.1845. Before the windswept flames burned themselves out virtually every building in the downtown area was gone. Only one life was lost but an estimated 1,100 houses were destroyed along with cotton-factories, iron-works, glassworks, hotels and several churches in a general desolation. So all of Pittsburgh’s buildings date to after the 1850s.
Coincidentally, this is about the time the Pennsylvania Railroad reached the Allegheny River from Philadelphia and oil was discovered north of the city near Titusville. Pittsburgh was set to explode. The city’s great industrialists - Carnegie, Frick, Oliver and Phipps - were making unthinkable fortunes in steel mills and factories and finance. And soon they were itching to throw millions of dollars into building monumental skyscrapers to their legacies.
The avenue of choice for this building splurge was Grant Avenue, historically the outer limit of Pittsburgh. Grant Avenue was at one time Grant’s Hill, a natural eastern boundary for the city but also an impediment to a growing metropolis. Over the decades some 60 feet of “the Hump” would be removed. And after the most famous architect of the 20th century, Henry Hobson Richardson, constructed the epic Allegheny County Courthouse in 1884 it ignited a wave of modern skyscrapers that converted the street into downtown Pittsburgh’s showcase thoroughfare.
Our walking tour will begin in a small park in the shadow of Pittsburgh’s tallest skyscraper and later explore the narrow 25-foot wide street that emerged as Pittsburgh’s Wall Street in the late 1800s and early 1900s...
Pittsburgh - Cultural District
The Cultural District was the vision of H.J. Heinz II, grandson of Henry J. Heinz, who was Chief Executive Officer of the company his grandfather founded for 25 years. It as his belief that the arts could spearhead an urban revitalization and economic development of a city’s blighted area. The turn-around started in 1971 with the restoration of Heinz Hall, once a motion-picture palace, into a home for the Pittsburgh Symphony.
In 1984 the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust was formed to transform a fourteen-square block area of downtown Pittsburgh along the Penn-Liberty corridor. Today two dozen venues attract over 2,000,000 people to the Cultural District every year in one of the City’s best preserved and most nearly intact districts.
Pittsburgh’s streets were laid out in 1784 by the surveyors George Woods and Thomas Vickroy, who were agents of the Penn family in Philadelphia. This has historically been a diverse mix of urban uses and by 1900 many important local architects had left their mark on the Penn-Liberty area. A rail line ran down Liberty Avenue at the district’s southern edge and an elevated rail line was slated to run along the Allegheny River shore. But with the Depression of the 1930s the commercial buildings, theaters, hotels and stores began to slide into decline.
Our walking tour will explore these blocks of rebirth along the Allegheny River up but first we’ll start where Pittsburgh started, at the confluence of two great rivers coming together to form a third...
Oakland lays claim to being the third largest “downtown” in Pennsylvania after Center City Philadelphia and Downtown Pittsburgh. It is stuffed with museums, prestigious universities, fabled eateries, live entertainment venues, public art, spiritual centers and a huge quotient of “hipness.”
In 1905, Franklin Nicola, who had purchased land from the estate of Mary Schenley two years earlier, put forth a development plan in the City Beautiful style, then sweeping across America, for Oakland. The City Beautiful movement favored boulevards, parks, and formal civic buildings in the Beaux-Arts style evoking ancient Greece and the Italian Renaissance. Although Nicola’s plan was not fully implemented, including a never-constructed Oakland town hall, it produced several important landmarks. Oakland, is in fact, now home to three historic districts: The Schenley Farms National Historic District, the Oakland Civic Center Historic District and the Oakland Square Historic District.
Other major landmark buildings were added to Oakland after the pursuit of Nicola’s designs had ended, including the landmark Cathedral of Learning and Heinz Memorial Chapel of the University of Pittsburgh and Andrew Carnegie’s contributions to the school he founded and the massive civic project that eventually became the Carnegie Museums and Library.
Our walking tour will travel down the two main thoroughfares that bustle with activity through Oakland, Forbes Avenue and Fifth Avenue, but first we’ll begin in the bucolic open spaces of a great city park that was donated by a girl who ran away to elope when she was just a teenager....
John Potts built a Colonial-era iron empire at the confluence of the Schuylkill River and Manatawney Creek in the 1750s. In 1761 he advertised building lots for sale in a new town he was calling Pottsgrove along the Great Road that led from Philadelphia out to Reading. The village grew slowly, inhabited mainly by Pottses - John had 13 children. There were still only a few hundred inhabitants a half-century later when Pottsgrove officially became Pottstown when it was incorporated as the second borough in Montgomery County, just three years after the first, Norristown, was established.
By 1840 there were still less than a thousand people living in the rural village when the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad made a fateful decision to run its tracks on Pottstown’s side of the Schuylkill River and locate much of its car building and repair facilities in the town. The population would grow 16-fold before the end of the 19th century.
Pottstown’s heavy industry became known nationwide. The first iron truss bridge in the United States was built in 1845 in the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad blacksmith shop. A girder from that bridge is on display in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Iron and steel from Pottstown’s furnaces and rolling mills was used in the George Washington Bridge, on the locks of the Panama Canal and in America’s first skyscrapers. John Ellis had built a factory to produce his Ellis Champion Grain Thresher, which was being shipped to practically every grain growing country in the world.
Most of the building stock on Pottstown’s present-day streets emanates from the boom days of the late 1800s through early 1900s. There are many fine examples of residential and commercial buildings from that time when Pottstown was an important iron center.
Our walking tour will explore the Old Pottstown Historic District that roughly adheres to the town laid out by John Potts in 1761 and we’ll begin at the elegant Georgian home of the old iron master himself...
Pottsville’s history is tied to anthracite coal like a twisted pretzel braid. Its beginnings with the black diamond date to 1790 and the whimsical legend of a careless hunter named Necho Allen. Seems he fell asleep one night at the base of the Broad Mountain and woke to the sight of a large fire. His campfire had ignited an outcropping of coal. By 1795, an anthracite fired iron furnace was established on the Schuylkill River. In 1806, John Pott purchased the furnace and then founded the city of Pottsville. The site of Pottsville was originally located in Chester County. Subsequently Pottsville became part of Lancaster County, then Berks and ultimately in 1811 Schuylkill County. The borough of Pottsville became Schuylkill County’s seat in 1851 and developed into its only city.
Construction of the Schuylkill Canal, which ran a distance of 108 miles along the Upper Schuylkill River, was completed to Port Carbon by 1828 to transport the coal to larger markets. The canal spurred the development of more anthracite mines, and before long, the anthracite production in and around Pottsville was largely impacting America’s Industrial Revolution. The nine counties in northeast Pennsylvania contain 97% of the country’s anthracite coal reserves (the type of coal with the highest heating value, containing 86-97% carbon) and by 1854 half of all coal produced in America was Pennsylvania anthracite.
The growth of mine-related industries produced a population surge as immigrants came to work in the mines. The population doubled between 1820 and 1840. This led to the development of businesses, churches, and schools. Other industries grew up to support the mines. One was the Phillips Van Heusen company which was founded in 1881 when Moses Phillips and his wife Endel began sewing shirts by hand and selling them from pushcarts to the local coal miners.
During the 1870s, Pottsville’s began its greatest period of prosperity, an era that would last until the Great Depression. In the 1920s Pottsville even fielded one of the most powerful professional football teams in the country. After winning the championship of the Anthracite League comprised of Pennsylvania mining town teams in 1924, the Pottsville Maroons (supposedly named for the color of their jerseys) joined the National Football League in 1925. They won their first game against Buffalo 28-0 and finished the season 9-1-1 and beat the Chicago Cardinals in the NFL championship game 21-7. The title was later taken away, however, when the team played a college all-star team and so the Pottsville Maroons were stripped from the NFL record books. The franchise left for Boston in 1929.
The region survived the Depression because of the demand for coal and the Works Project Administration that created jobs through the construction of City Hall and the old Post Office. After World War II, however, recession in the mines struck the region hard. Hundreds moved as mines shut down and construction of a bypass routed traffic away from the downtown. Our walking tour will get off that bypass and begin at City Hall, the last major building constructed in downtown Pottsville...
In 1733, the site of present day Reading was chosen. It was set at the intersection of two great valleys, the east Penn-Lebanon Valley and the Schuylkill River. This site was known as Finney’s Ford until 1743 when Thomas Lawrence, a Penn Land agent, made the first attempt at the layout for Reading. In 1748, the town was laid out by Thomas and Richard Penn, the sons of William Penn. The name was chosen after Penn’s own county seat, Reading, in Berkshire, England. In 1752, Reading became the county seat of Berks County.
During the French and Indian war, Reading became a military base for a chain of forts along the Blue Mountains. The local iron industry, by the time of the Revolution had a total production that exceeded that of England, a production that would help supply Washington’s troops with weapons including cannons, rifles and ammunition.
The center of Reading was known as market square, with open sheds where farmers would sell their produce and hold a yearly fair. Later the square became the center of government and commerce with the County Courthouse, banks, stores and hotels located on the site. The construction of the Reading Railroad, its lines radiating in all directions from the City, was probably the greatest single factor in the development of Berks County. Established in 1833 to transport coal, its operations grew to include coal mining, iron making, canal and sea-going transportation and shipbuilding. By 1870 it was the largest corporation in the world.
Reading did not officially incorporate as a city until the 1840s, when its population had grown to 12,000 people living in rows of red brick houses. In the fifty years following the Civil War, Reading continued to grow as an industrial city, supporting one of the most diverse manufacturing bases of any city in the country. Bicycles, wagons, hats, cigars, clocks, shoes, brass, bricks, steam engines, rope, beer and pretzels, and many other items were all manufactured in the city or the surrounding area. In 1900 Charles Duryea came to Reading to make one of the earliest automobiles. Duryea Drive on Mt. Penn still carries his name and is the site of an annual car race up to the top of the mountain.
Our walking tour will begin in City Park, or Penn’s Common, just east of city center...
The Ridgway name in question belonged to Jacob Ridgway, a Philadelphia shipping merchant. Ridgway never visited the town - in fact, he didn’t spend much time in Philadelphia. He spent large chunks of his time in the early 19th century abroad in London, sending back heaping quantities of money to be invested in real estate. The records are a bit murky, but it is generally accepted that Ridgway owned in excess of 100,000 acres of Western Pennsylvania woods. Into that wilderness in 1821 rode James L. Gillis, nephew of Jacob Ridgway by marriage, was appointed the land agent for Mr. Ridgway’s holdings. Gillis, his wife and their three children arrived by packhorse and ox-team.
Ridgway was plotted as an unincorporated village in 1833 in Jefferson County and a decade later when Elk County formed it became the county seat. Ridgway quickly became an important local political hub and regional manufacturing center, home to large tanneries and, most importantly, lumber fortunes.
The most important of Ridgway’s lumber businesses was the Hyde-Murphy Company, an internationally recognized producer of architectural millwork and art glass. Joseph Hyde was an early town pioneer and lumberman and Walter Murphy was a carpenter, contractor and mill owner before joining forces with Hyde in 1884. The company was responsible for to countless projects in the north-central Pennsylvania region, including the vast majority of substantial buildings erected in the Ridgway historic district. Its long list of clients include the Pentagon, embassies in Washington, D. C., and the Tripoli Hospital in Honolulu, among many other prestigious buildings. The Hyde-Murphy operation occupied a fifteen-building campus just north of the historic district along Race Street. The company ceased operation in 1961 and In 1974 the remaining buildings of the large complex were demolished to make way for the Ridgway Community Park.
Enough trees were felled and floated down the Clarion River that by the end of the 1800s it was said that there were more millionaires per capita living in Ridgway than any other place in America. Their legacy in the “Lily of the Valley” was designated a National Historic Register by the National Park Service in 2002. Our walking tour will start in front of the seat of justice for Elk County and see the handiwork of some of Pennsylvania’s biggest lumber barons…
The first European settlers in Scranton were the Abbott brothers, who founded a gristmill here in 1786. In 1800 the Slocum brothers took the mill over and began a charcoal furnace for iron manufacturing. A post office opened in 1811 and the delivery address was Slocum Hollow.
It was still an area of de-centralized small businesses and modest communities in 1842 when William Henry, a native of Nazareth who had been operating a blast furnace in New Jersey, arrived with his son-in-law, Seldon T. Scranton. William Henry was a geologist and surveyor. He had previously visited the area and had discovered deposits of iron ore in the hills surrounding the Roaring Brook and Lackawanna River. Soon, Seldon’s brother, George W. Scranton, arrived from Connecticut; the Slocum property was purchased, and funds were secured from a number of venture capitalists for the construction of the Lackawanna Furnace. By 1846, the Lackawanna Furnace and Rolling Mills Company was producing nails for market.
Still more Scrantons began arriving. This time it was cousin Joseph, who was a successful Georgia merchant. The next year year, a U.S. Post Office was established in the town then called “Scrantonia” after the Scranton family. Also, during this time period the coal boom was in full swing and the first wave of immigrants from England, Wales, Ireland, and Germany was beginning to settle in the region.
Scranton, then part of Luzerne County, continued to grow until it surpassed the county seat, Wilkes-Barre in population and importance. Residents had long agitated for their own county; Brandford and Susquehanna counties had seceded from Luzerne with little contest. But losing Scranton - and its rich industrial taxbase - was a different matter. When a new State constitution in 1874 allowed voters of a proposed breakaway county to decide their fate, citizens of Lackawanna County voted nearly 6 to 1 in favor of creating Pennsylvania’s last county, ending a nearly 40-year struggle.
The growing importance of anthracite (hard) coal earned Scranton the nickname “Anthracite Capital of the World” and kept the city humming through the early 1900s. The declining demand for coal after World War II forced Scranton, earlier than other industrial centers, to endeavor to find ways to diversify its economy. Its Scranton Plan, a revitalization plan devised in 1945, has been used as a model for other cities in decline.
Our walking tour of the downtown area will encounter splashes of that rebirth while exploring the core of one of America’s great mid-size cities of the industrial age...
The first settlement was established in 1795 when Benjamin Bentley came from Washington County, Pennsylvania, and explored the region along the Shenango River. He set up a “tomahawk claim” of over 400 acres on the east side of the Shenango River, and south of what is now State Street. The next year he brought his wife and six children to Sharon in a canoe, having erected a rude log cabin the year before. In 1798 William Budd and Charles and Frances Reno came to Sharon.
A great deal of the downtown section of the city now covers what were the farms of these early settlers that lay on a flat plain bordering the Shenango River. According to local legend, the community probably received its name from a Bible-reading settler who likened the location to the Plain of Sharon in Israel.
Sharon grew very slowly. At the time of its incorporation as a borough in 1841 there were about 400 inhabitants; in 1850, 541; and in 1860, still only 900. But things were about to change. Coal was first discovered by accident early in 1835, cropping out of the hillside west of Sharon. Charles Meek opened the first mine on the property. This was the beginning of the famous Mercer County block coal. Because the coal possessed a peculiar structure, and because it retained its shape until it fell into ashes, it was especially fitted for the manufacture of pig iron. Pig iron made from this coal in 1876 was claimed to be the best made in America. From 1835 to 1876 more than fifty mines were opened.
Mercer County block coal did not run in veins but was deposited in “basins” or “swamps,” varying in thickness from five to seven feet in the center. It tapered off into rock at the edges. The coal was removed usually from drift mines. The mine cars, of about 1200 pounds capacity, were pulled from the mines on wooden tracks by large dogs.
Due to these large coal deposits, Sharon became a beehive of industrial activity, with rolling mills, boiler and machine shops, furnaces, flour mills, ordnance works, and manufactories of explosives, nails, horse collars, spokes, chains, stoves, and lumber products. By the time Sharon was incorporated as a city in 1917, the population had swelled to more than 20,000, the largest city in Mercer County.
Sharon remained a booming steel town into 1960s. The Malibu division of National Castings, Sharon Steel Corporation and Westinghouse Corporation were all major employers. Most of the plants have shuttered and industry moved on. Today, Sharon is best known to outsiders for its quirky Big Three - a trio of stores that bill themselves as the “World’s Largest,” selling candy, shoes and discount clothes.
Our walking tour will begin atop the Shenango River that dissects the town and we’ll move from the recently rehabilitated State Street Bridge aways up those hills that cradle the town on both sides...
Stroudsburg stands on the site of Fort Hamilton, built in 1756 at the direction of Benjamin Franklin. It was one of a chain of frontier forts built to protect European settlers from Indian attacks. In 1760, Jacob Stroud, a former indentured servant, settled on land along the Pocono, McMichaels, and Brodhead Creeks, which later powered his grist and sawmills. Following the bloody Wyoming Valley Massacre in 1778, Stroud built a stockade around his house and substantial land holdings. The Stroud compound later became known as Fort Penn, which stood on what is today the 500 block of Main Street.
Stroudsburg is the oldest town in the region, founded a generation before Monroe County was created. Jacob Stroud advertised the subdivision of his property on October 17, 1799 in the American Eagle, a newspaper published in Easton, then the county seat for the entire area, thusly: “Looking to dispose on very reasonable terms to mechanics and others, who will build upon the lots. A condition of building within three years will be part of every contract, and therefore no person need apply for a lot unless he is determined to become an improver of the town which will hence forward be called Stroudsburg.”
The streets were named for his relatives, and lots sold quickly. Stroudsburg had attracted enough people and commerce by 1815 to incorporate as a borough and it was a popular choice for a county seat when Monroe County was created in 1836. Still, real growth did not come until it rode into town on the rails of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad that linked Stroudsburg to New York City in 1856. The population would triple over the remainder of the 19th century.
Lumber mills, tanneries, and textile mills along McMichaels Creek powered the early economy. About 1853, Ephram Culver built a grist mill, only to see it burned by Indians. Later, more mills were built. Many were destroyed by floods. The present dam, believed to be built before 1884, diverted water to mills and factories along lower Main Street via a mill race which has long since been buried. Eventually all would cede importance to the tourist trade in the Pocono Mountains.
Our walking tour will start at the house of the man who started the town...
There was never any first discovery of oil. Petroleum had been known for thousands of years, gurgling from oil springs or seeps bubbling to the surface. It was used as medicine and for light in its natural state despite a nasty odor. In the early 1850s a number of people began experimenting with refining crude oil to improve its burning properties and eradicate its foul smell. They were successful enough that the demand for kerosene to outstrip the supply of oil.
The Seneca Oil Company of New Haven, Connecticut, leased land in western Pennsylvania and skimmed petroleum off oil springs in the region. In 1858 Edwin L. Drake was sent to Titusville, a town founded in 1800 by two former surveyors for the Hoeland Land Company, Jonathan Titus and Samuel Kerr who purchased land and established residences, to find a way to increase production. At first he tried digging but soon decided to drill a well, similar to the way saltwater was sometimes excavated. Progress at first was slow; the soft glacial till around Oil Creek kept caving into the hole. Drake finally hit on the idea of driving a pipe down to bedrock and drilling inside it.
It was not long before Drake’s ingenuity paid ff. On August 27, 1859, 69 feet inside the earth, he struck pay dirt in the worlds first oil well. Drake was lucky. had he drilled a few yards in either direction along the creek he would have had to go down another 100 feet to tap his oil reservoir. a pump was attached to his well and soon Drake was producing about 20 barrels of oil a day, double the rate of production of all existing sources at the time. Speculators soon lined Oil Creek with derricks and pumps.
The world had never seen anything like it. Boomtowns burst into existence overnight. One town, Pithole City, went from a farm to a city of 15,000 people to a ghost town all in a span of 500 days. Titusville reigned as “Queen City” of the region for little more than a decade before the action drifted away. Drake himself made no fortune from oil. The glut of oil drove the price so low by 1862 that he and his partners went out of business. he processed leases for speculators and later lost money in oil speculation. He died 30 years after his historic strike, a poor and forgotten man.
The first great development period in Titusville was lumber related and the lumber industry did not end with the oil boom. The early oil boom years only served to increase the demand for wood used in the production of shipping barrels, the construction of derricks, workers home and other community buildings.
Our walking tour will visit the Titusville Historic District, nominated to the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, that is a compact representation of the town’s development from the beginning of the oil industry through the turn of the 20th century...
Uniontown is unusual for Western Pennsylvania towns in that it did not grow on a navigable river and it is also unique for having not one boom, but two. The first great growth spurt took place from 1811 to the 1850s with the construction of the National Road from Cumberland, Maryland to Wheeling, West Virginia and eventually into Illinois. Uniontown became an important stop on the road, with stagecoach factories, stage and wagon yards, stables and blacksmith shops and at least a dozen taverns to serve weary travelers. After the railroad reached Wheeling in 1852 the National Road gradually diminished in importance and devolved into a local market road. How quiet did it become in Uniontown? Only eight building extant in the historic district were built between 1860 and 1880.
Then came the coal and coke boom and Uniontown bubbled with activity for the next 50 years, until the Great Depression. The existence of soft, bituminous coal in the region had been known since Henry Beeson settled here and built a mill on Redstone Creek in 1768. But when the hungry mills in Pittsburgh demanded coke distilled from coal to make steel they turned to the cola fields in their back yard, which just happened to possess immense deposits of the best metallurgical coal in the world. Uniontown had three major mines and tens of thousands of beehive coke ovens nearby but its principal contribution was as the operational and financial center of the coal and coke industry. These new coal barons liked to build - in 1912 Uniontown counted in its downtown nine banks, 13 theaters and 14 hotels.
That’s not the Uniontown you will experience today. Our walking tour of the quieter streets of the 21st century will begin at the site of the boyhood home of one of the 20th century’s most accomplished men, a place that has been transformed into Uniontown’s Gateway...
The French began staking claims to this land in 1669. In 1748, Virginia planters formed the Ohio Company to affect settlement in southwestern Pennsylvania and carry on Indian trade on a large scale. It took a decade - and a loss on the field at Fort Duquesne by George Washington - before the British could expel the French and settlements began in the area of present Washington County. One of those clusters of log structures was “Bassett, alias Dandridge Town,” laid out by John and William Hoge later named Washington, where a log courthouse was constructed in 1787 to serve as the county seat of Washington County, the first county in the United States of America to be named in honor of General George Washington. Washington County was formed to allow “the inhabitants of the area west of the Monongahela River to have more convenient courts and public offices, rather than the inconvenience and hardship of being so far remote from the seat of justice.”
A school was holding classes as early as 1781 and a newspaper and post office were in place by 1800. George Washington’s early years as a surveyor enabled him to see the need for a “national” road through the Allegheny Mountains connecting the eastern seaboard centers with the Ohio Valley and the western frontier. Completed in 1818 and still in use today, the National Pike (Route 40) runs through Washington on Maiden Street. The town’s influence and prestige grew steadily through the 1800s as one of the gateways for immigration to the West and its bustling commerce.
The region was built on the pillars of coal, steel, oil and glass and the town of “Little Washington” provided the support for these industries. At the height of its prosperity, in 1900 a magnificent, muscular county courthouse was constructed in the center of town and that is where our walking tour will get under way...
Wellsboro was founded in 1806 by Quaker settlers from Delaware, Maryland and Philadelphia, it was incorporated in 1830. Tradition has long held that the little settlement was named in honor of Mary Wells, wife of one of the original settlers, Benjamin Wister Morris. It is her life-size bronze statue that stands at the Tioga County Historical Society but some historians have argued that the credit may belong to William Wells, Mary’s brother.
This section of the state was part of the Connecticut Grant that extended the north and south boundaries of the colony of Connecticut all the way to the Great Lakes; consequently it was settled by many of the early New England colonists. The large houses set well back from the streets on spacious well-kept lawns are truly indicative of the planning of New England towns. Noted for beautiful elms, maple trees and wide boulevards with gas lights, Wellsboro has long been a favorite of travelers. The 50-mile long Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania is a scant ten miles from town.
Wellsboro’s earliest period of growth, between the 1830s and the turn of the twentieth century, was at first of an agricultural character and was later associated with the lumber industry. Commercial development in the downtown occurred in the wake of two major fires in the 1870s which destroyed much of the downtown. As rebuilding occurred, brick became the favored construction material and the extant character of the commercial portion of the historic district reflects this era of reconstruction. In 1872 the Lawrenceville and Wellsboro Railroad laid the first line into the community, followed in 1881 by the Jersey Shore, Pine Creek, & Buffalo. As the lumber industry waned it was followed by coal extraction and, most importantly, in the early 1900s, by the glass industry - light bulbs and then Christmas lights.
The Wellsboro Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. The architecture of the district reflects the level of maturity in Wellsboro at the turn of the twentieth century, by which time many of the resources in the district were in place. High-style houses were built for civic and industrial leaders, primarily along Main Street and West Avenue. A feature which adds considerably to the visual character of the district is found along portions of both Main Street and Central Avenue, which have boulevards with trees, grass, and Wellsboro’s signature gas street lights mounted on cast iron poles.
Our walking tour will begin in the center of town around the New England-style Green and explore first the residential area along Main Street to the west and then come back and see the business district to the east...
West Chester grew up at the intersection of two Colonial wagon roads, one that went from Philadelphia to Lancaster and one that went from Wilmington to Reading. The crossroads was roughly a day’s ride for teamsters from each of the four cities and was an ideal location for a tavern. That tavern appeared in the 1760s and became known as Turk’s Head Tavern.
By the 1780s the name “West Chester” was being used by petitioners trying to pry the Chester County seat off the Delaware River at Chester where it had been since since the county’s creation in 1720 as Pennsylvania’s first jurisdiction outside Philadelphia. In 1788 West Chester became that more centrally located seat and was incorporated as a borough in 1799.
But there was no industry here, no water to power it, no marketplace. For the better part of 50 years there was no development beyond shouting distance of the little courthouse. The first to take a gamble on West chester was William Everhart who set up shop on Gay Street in 1824 to sell ceramics imported from England. Everhart’s reputation was made when he survived a shipwreck off the Irish coast, losing $10,000 in the tragedy. Afterwards he declined to accept any of the money found in the wreckage because he couldn’t vouch that it was his.
In 1829 Everhart paid $16,000 for 102 acres of farmland on the western edge of town. Confounding skeptics who had witnessed no growth in West chester for decades, he divvied the land up into building lots and listed them for sale. On the very first day he sold fifty lots and recouped his original investment. He would continue to hold land auctions into the 1840s and built over 100 brick homes on his lots along the streets he laid out and named after his friends - Miner, Barnard, Darlington, Wayne.
Like its fellow suburban county seats Doylestown and Media, West Chester never became an industrial town despite its new residential appeal. It developed as the governmental, legal, cultural and commercial focal point of its county. Much of the downtown remains intact and the entire district is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 2001 an exuberantPhiladelphia Inquirer article declared West Chester “the perfect town” and borough promoters have taken the compliment and run with it. Our walking tour to see for ourselves will begin, appropriately enough, at the highest point in town...
In A History of Luzerne County, published in 1893, Wilkes-Barre was described thusly: “The important city and the first settlement in Luzerne county is the one descriptive phrase applicable to this city. A beautiful city, queen of the Susquehanna north of Harrisburg to its source: a crown-jewel on the east bank of the river and in the center of the far-famed Wyoming valley; the county seat of Luzerne county, the center and hub from where flows out in every direction by electric and steam railroads, her rich trade, and the daily and hourly ever swelling stream of visitors for business and pleasure; a city truly, a rich and beautiful city, now invested with all that you may find in the way of luxuries in the great metropolis, as well as the forest trees, the flowing peaceful river and the pure air that comes of a rural life; where is elegance, refinement and culture; where there are more families of great wealth, comparatively to numbers, than can be found in any other city in the United States. A city that never had a “boom” but that now is forging ahead at a marvelous step, and on every hand are suburban boroughs that are progressing rapidly. Here is the capital of a county that is of itself a rich and distinct empire.”
A town like that is worth fighting over, and that is what happened in its early days. The first Europeans to settle the area arrived in 1769, from Connecticut, a colony which had a land grant from the British crown that extended all the Great Lakes. The settlement was named Wilkes-Barre after John Wilkes and Isaac Barré, two British members of Parliament who supported colonial America. Armed men loyal to Pennsylvania, wielding a claim to the land by virtue of William Penn’s grant, twice attempted to evict the residents of Wilkes-Barre in what came to be known as the Pennamite Wars. The conflict was not put to rest until after the American Revolution when the settlers were allowed to retain title to their lands but had to transfer their allegiance to Pennsylvania.
Wilkes-Barre’s population exploded due to the discovery of anthracite coal in the 1800s, which gave the city the nickname of “The Diamond City.” The wealth that flowed into the city from the world’s largest coal field began showing up on the Wilkes-Barre streetscape in the form of fancy hotels, massive mansions and imposing churches.
Wilkes-Barre took a major blow from Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972 when rainwaters swelled the Susquehanna River to a height of nearly 41 feet, four feet above the city’s levees, flooding downtown with nine feet of water. While no lives were lost, 25,000 homes and businesses were either damaged or destroyed, and damages were estimated to be $1 billion.
Much remains, however, and our walking tour will begin the investigation in the Public Square, a diamond set in the center of the “Diamond City”...
Williamsport for decades was an unremarkable crossroads community of less than 2,000 people, a stop along the Pennsylvania Canal and a marketing destination for the numerous small farms of the area. In 1847, the potential for the logging business took a great leap forward with the establishment of the first “Log Boom” in the Susquehanna River. The west branch of the river from Linden to Halls Station was referred to as the “Long Reach,” which was an area of almost no fall in the elevation of the riverbed. This provided an ideal point to locate a log boom, which was a series of river piers with heavy chains strung between them used to catch the slow moving logs as they came down the river. This fostered the development of an entire series of related lumber processing sites in Williamsport that included log cribs and ponds, sawmills, storage and rail yards.
The impact on the town was dynamic; between 1860 and 1870, six major railroad lines arrived and the population tripled. By 1886, there were 28,000 inhabitants of the city. Williamsport, with 29 sawmills, became known as the lumber capital of the world. Its great mills, strategically located on the Susquehanna River, were supplied by the log boom that stretched seven miles along the river front and was credited with a holding capacity of over 250 million board feet of lumber or nearly two million logs.
It was on this wooden foundation that fortunes were made. Williamsport was said to have had more millionaires than any place in America for a time. The lumber barons built spectacular homes, first along East Third Street and then migrating to West Fourth Street, which remained a fashionable neighborhood well into the 1900s before numerous demolitions and commercial development nearly erased all vestiges of its one-time splendor.
In 1889, the Susquehanna River swelled over its banks and caused considerable damage to the lumber facilities located in the city. This, coupled with the declining timber resources, signaled an end to the traditional economic base, although the lumber business remained until the early 1900s.
Our walking tour will begin just east of Millionaires Row, as West Fourth Street came to be know, and explore the downtown area before reversing course and seeing what traces remain of some of Pennsylvania's greatest fortunes...
York was the first town laid out west of the Susquehanna River. In 1741, Thomas Cookson, a surveyor for the Penn family, plotted a town site of 446 acres in the heart of the family’s Springettsbury Manor. This tract had been laid out for Springett Penn, a grandson of William Penn, in 1722.
Cookson laid out straight streets, a generous 80 feet in width on each side of the junction of the Monocacy Road and the Codorus Creek. Squares measured 480 feet by 500 feet and provision was made for the location of public buildings in the very center of the town on a tract 110 feet square, now known as Continental Square. York can be considered one of the first instances of thoughtful city planning. The streets were assigned the English names of High (now Market, “High” was the traditional English moniker for a town’s main street), King, George, Duke, Queen, and Princess. The town itself was called York, after York, England. Along with the name of old York, the town founders adopted the symbol of the English city, the white rose, while the neighboring city of Lancaster similarly adopted the red rose.
The town of York did not fill up rapidly; although the framework of the town was English, most of the first settlers were Germans. York was originally governed as a part of Lancaster County but the distance from judge and jail encouraged thieves to operate without fear of punishment. A petition of the citizens for a separate county organization was granted in 1749 and York became the first county west of the Susquehanna, and the fifth in Pennsylvania. A colonial courthouse was ready by 1756 and next door was a market house.
During the American Revolution, when British General Howe’s armies occupied Philadelphia in September, 1777, the members of Continental Congress fled to Lancaster, where they remained but one day. Then, feeling that they would be safer with the Susquehanna between them and the British, they crossed at Wrights’ Ferry and resumed sessions in the Colonial Courthouse in the tiny frontier town of York. They stayed nine months and when the Articles of Confederation, a provisional plan of government in which the term United States of America was first used, were adopted here York laid claim to being the nation’s first capital. In 1789, Congressman Thomas Hartley, speaking before Congress, took a swing at making York the permanent capital of the United States but the honor was ticketed further south, along the Potomac River.
Our walking tour will begin amidst the historical relics of the 18th century and transition through the impressive York architecture that reflects the prosperous 19th century industrial community it became...