Kennett Square began as an eighteenth-century crossroads market town on the Baltimore Pike (its meeting was Old Kennett; CH1). It grew rapidly after the Civil War with its connection to the railroad. Though good building stone is...
West Chester, the county seat since the resolution of the removal controversy in 1786, is the principal architectural heart of Chester County. Like so many early Pennsylvania towns it was centered on a tavern, the Turks Head, near which the first courthouse and jail...
The route west along the old Lancaster Pike (U.S. 30) was interrupted by small taverns at major crossroads, such as Downing's tavern where the West Chester road (U.S. 322) crossed U.S. 30. Downingtown, Coatesville, and Parkesburg form a nearly continuous commercial...
North of the Pennsylvania Turnpike (I-76), Chester County has a rural character until it nears Phoenixville on the Schuylkill River. Phoenixville occupies an important role in the nation's architectural history for the presence of the Phoenix Iron Company (...
Beginning in the 1740s, a second tier of counties was established beyond William Penn's original settlement. They share a common cultural heritage reflected in their names that are derived from English counties—Northampton, Berks, Lancaster, Cumberland,...
County text and building entries by Bruce Thomas
When Northampton County was created in 1752 it encompassed all of northeastern Pennsylvania, an area one-sixth the size of today's commonwealth, extending north along the western bank of the Delaware River to an...
Easton was founded in 1750 by Thomas and Richard Penn, who intended it to be the seat of newly formed Northampton County. Their motives were strictly political: they preferred an English-speaking county seat, not an easy matter when 85 percent of the new county's population was German....
Northwest of Easton, just below the Kittatinny Ridge, is a band of hills known as the Slate Belt. Their commercial exploitation began in 1848 with the arrival from Wales of Robert M. Jones. Other Welsh immigrants followed, establishing Bangor—the largest and most prosperous community of...
Smaller than nearby Bangor, Pen Argyl was also named for a Welsh mining town. It bloomed with the arrival of the railroad in the 1880s, and its architectural character is of a late Victorian industrial vernacular. Perhaps its most arresting feature is the pair of matching three-story...
In 1740, George Whitefield, an early Methodist preacher and associate of Methodism's founder John Wesley, bought five thousand acres near the Forks of the Delaware with the intention of building a school for African American children. Needing experienced builders, he paid the passage...
In the summer of 1741 Peter Boehler and his party of Moravian colonists, who had been working for the Reverend George Whitefield at Nazareth, moved nine miles south to their recently purchased five-hundred-acre tract on the north bank of the Lehigh River. Shortly before Christmas...
As Bethlehem grew beyond its Moravian beginnings and matured into a commercial city of consequence in the second half of the nineteenth century, the district across the river remained a separate political and cultural entity. Unlike Moravian Bethlehem to the north, South...
County text and building entries by Bruce Thomas
Lehigh County was formed out of Northampton County in 1812. Comprising 350 square miles, it is defined on the north by the Lehigh River, on the east by South Mountain below Bethlehem, and on the west by the Blue Mountain...
In 1735, Philadelphia merchant William Allen, Andrew Hamilton's son-in-law, bought five thousand acres along the Lehigh River from his business partner Joseph Turner, who had recently acquired the land from Thomas Penn. Little development took place before 1753, when a new road...
What eventually would be Catasauqua began as a river landing known as Biery's Port at the confluence of the Lehigh River and Catasauqua Creek, where a gristmill was built in 1752. Some decades later and one mile to the north, the village of Cranesville was formed around...
The region that is now Berks County has a spatial order that parallels its shaping historical forces. The Schuylkill River follows a roughly northwest–southeast line through the county's center and the South and Blue mountains establish a northeast–southwest boundary. The Kittatinny...
Birdsboro typifies the insular world of the early iron industry in the arc of villages that connect west to Cornwall in Lebanon County. Its founder, William Bird, whose house is now the police station at 200 Main Street (1751 and later), was the father of Marcus, who established the...
Reading was laid out by William Parsons as a proprietary town for William Penn's sons and adheres to the familiar Pennsylvania grid plan with numbered streets running north–south parallel to the riverfront and with treenamed streets on the east–west axis. An elongated...
Bounded by low hills, the Oley Valley marks the eastern extension of the belt of limestone that reaches west to Cumberland County, unifying much of the architecture of the German migration that has farmed its rich soil. The valley demonstrates the tendency of...
Hamburg is a centrally planned village and was named for the city in Germany. It made the transition to the industrial economy in large measure because of its position on the Schuylkill River. It is now notable for two commercial centers, the spectacular Cabela's...
The southeast corner of what is now Lancaster County was included in William Penn's first purchase in 1683 but most of its territory was acquired in the 1718 purchase. By 1729 there was sufficient population to warrant the formation of the first new county beyond Penn's original...
Strasburg is a remarkably complete eighteenth- and nineteenth-century market town with a slight widening of the street at the principal cross street. An extraordinary paneled brick facade for the Odd Fellows Hall (c. 1870) marks the intersection of N. Decatur and E. Main...
Lancaster was laid out by James Hamilton in 1730, the year after the county was established. It is the most important architectural center of its region and well worth visiting for the concentration of buildings in its downtown. At various times during the Revolution,...
The Susquehanna River became the center of canal-building activities at the end of the eighteenth century when Pennsylvanians began to look for means of moving products to markets over water rather than over land. In 1801,...
Incorporated in 1827, Washington Boro had two churches and several stores by midcentury for a population of nearly 700. Water Street is graced with several handsome Federal-style brick houses characterized by paired chimneys in the broad end gables that attest to the early...
Columbia stands astride the Lancaster Turnpike (U.S. 30), and in the middle of the nineteenth century was the terminus of the Pennsylvania Railroad that made the connection to the raft and ark-born cargoes of wood and coal that were shipped downriver. Incorporated in 1814, it...
The third river town has the characteristics of the first two, but its development stopped in the 1890s. West Market Street is notable for the remarkable First Farmers Bank at the corner of N. Mulberry Street. The stumpy columns carried on blocks on either side of the raised parapet...
Manheim was a regional mercantile center for the local agricultural district and now has become a leisure retail district. It has an elongated center market square and an assortment of commercial buildings and churches that are continuous from the second half of the...
Lititz had its beginning in 1741 when a local farmer, John George Klein, permitted the construction of a log church for Moravian services on his property after he heard Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf speak in Lancaster. Klein followed his initial gift with an additional four-...
