Athens merges with Sayre, a later railroad town that borders New York State. Together they fill the inhabitable part of the isthmus between the Chemung and Susquehanna rivers, which converge at Tioga Point. The Connecticut-based Susquehanna Company appreciated the site's geographical...
County text and building entries by Richard J. Webster
Sullivan County is as densely forested as it is sparsely populated. The county seat's year-round residents number fewer than 300 and the county has only one traffic light, where U.S. 220 and PA 87 intersect in...
Eagles Mere is a remarkably well-preserved turn-of-the-twentieth-century resort community built around a 250-acre spring-fed mountain lake. The lake was once known as Lewis Lake for English immigrant George Lewis, who established a glass factory here in 1803, which closed in 1829...
County text and building entries by Richard J. Webster
“Tioga” (spelled “Teaoga” and “Diahoga” in the eighteenth century) is Iroquois for “gate,” derived from the Iroquois word “teyaogen,” meaning “in the middle or between two things.” It appears to have referred to...
Mansfield is named for Rhode Islander Asa Mann, who arrived in 1800. He promptly cleared about twenty-five acres, divided them into building lots, and by 1804 was running a store, inn, and distillery. Mansfield became a borough in 1857 but never grew much in spite of being at the...
Lawrenceville epitomizes the dichotomous nature of Pennsylvania's Northern Tier; much of its life and culture have always been as a southern extension of upstate New York. Lawrenceville's northern boundary is the New York state line near the confluence of the Tioga and Cowanesque...
Wellsboro is the creation of a land agent serving the interests of a Philadelphia-based land company. In 1800, Benjamin Wistar Morris, of the important Philadelphia family, moved to a site that he would call Wellsboro in honor of his wife's family. Four years later, the...
County text and building entries by Richard J. Webster
Formed from Northumberland County in 1795, Lycoming County took some time to name. The state legislature rejected the names Jefferson, Susquehanna, and Muncy (the first two were subsequently given to later...
The name “Muncy” is derived from the Monsey (“wolf”) tribe of the Lenape, a name they carried with them when they moved west to what is now Muncie, Indiana. The first settlers were four Quaker brothers who arrived in 1787 and purchased three hundred acres. A decade later two...
The origin of Williamsport's name is open to dispute. Claims have been made for Judge William Hepburn, Joseph Williams (the town's surveyor), and Michael Ross, who owned 285 acres on the future city's site and who perhaps named it for his son William. In any event,...
Jersey Shore's name never fails to befuddle, especially those from the Philadelphia region. The town's name derives from its first settlers, who came from Essex County, New Jersey, in the 1780s to the western side of the Susquehanna River's West Branch. Soon those...
[The following essay was WHJ's draft, dated December 10, 1996, for the introduction to this volume. Given his personal style and his unique perception of what Alexander Pope called “the genius of the place” (a concept mentioned here...
Among America's oldest cities, Providence has a special sense of place. Like its contemporaries, it has been built and rebuilt many times. Development, however, has not resulted in wholesale destruction and replacement, but in complex layering, which reveals the built legacies created...
The old business district of Providence offers an exceptional array of fine historic buildings dating from the late Federal and Greek Revival periods, when stores and offices began in earnest to cross the Providence River from their original...
Beyond the interstate underpass, Chestnut Street becomes a street of industrial buildings which provides an introduction to the Jewelry District. If Samuel Slater represents the technological progenitor for Rhode Island's textile industry (see under...
Main Street formed the spine of the original English colonial settlement of Providence. Along the street's west side lay the Providence River, and to its east, up the steep slope of College Hill, stretched the deep, narrow house lots of the early settlers. Main...
College Hill is that part of the East Side residential district concentrated on the steep slope rising from Main Street out of the city's center and extending beyond the crest of the hill roughly to Hope Street—the cutoff point in the local unconscious for the...
224 Benefit St.
Next in line come the three major buildings which make up the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. The first (set back from Benefit Street) is the Farago Wing; then the Pendleton House and, attached to it,...
On and off Benefit from George Street south to Williams Street stands a remarkable ensemble of nineteenth-century buildings, especially of the Federal period, which deserve attention, although few can be individually discussed. Farther south, Benefit and its side...
Broadway really became such in 1854, when it reached its present length and breadth of 80 feet for the full distance, making it the broadest way in Providence at the time. Lined with trees, and from the 1860s served by trolleys, it became a street of choice for...
The following group of Queen Anne houses on Parade Street comprises a few of those rehabilitated in the area known as the Armory District (for the Cranston Street Armory), a focus of the Providence Preservation Society, which established its Revolving Fund...
Pawtucket takes its name from an Algonquian word meaning “at the falls.” The area below the falls of the Blackstone River—a major ford long before the arrival of white colonists—was a place of good fishing in the aerated pools and a place for informal meetings, sometimes tense, of...
Central Falls is a mere knob of a community and the most densely populated of all Rhode Island towns. The Blackstone River curls around the northern and eastern sides of the town, marking these boundaries with three falls along this portion of its course. As in precolonial...
Not until 1874 did North Providence acquire the boundaries it has today. Previously, what is now its eastern third had been part of Pawtucket and its middle third part of Providence. Agriculture long dominated its economic life. Fairly good soils and relatively easy access...
The combination of rural and aesthetic in this country suburb and the success of the mix of late Victorian–Queen Anne design in expressing these sentiments is evident in two nearby buildings, both unfortunately altered. The first, at 474 Fruit Hill Road, is St. James...
As late as 1978 a report of the Rhode Island Historical Preservation Commission asserted that Allendale was the best preserved of North Providence mill villages. Though dilapidated by the 1980s, its mill was also picturesque—until its conversion to condominiums resulted in...
Although textile manufacture began in Greystone as early as 1813 and continued through a series of operations punctuated by fires and many changes of ownership, most of what one now sees is the result of the twentieth-century location there of the English firm of Joseph Benn...
Like New Hampshire's Old Man of the Mountain, the eastern border of Johnston, where it butts against Providence, might, with some imagination, be seen as a profile emergent from a skewed block. The Woonasquatucket River defines the profile. As in North Providence, Johnston's first...
Cranston, located on the west side of Narragansett Bay, has only a short coastline. Topographically the town has two principal sections, a flat outwash plain to the east and rolling uplands to the west; the two are divided in the middle of town by a granite scarp.
Cranston's...
Edgewood extends south from the Cranston-Providence line to somewhere around Massasoit Avenue, from the bay roughly west to Broad Street, and to Roger Williams Park above Westwood and Edgewood streets. The area has always maintained a degree of residential stability because of...
