A Different View from Camp Security Area Site
View of the Schultz House from top of field
I recently attended the Springettsbury Township officially announcing that the township has acquired the former Rowe farm. This acquisition preserved 115 undeveloped acres, the largest intact part of the 280 original tract of David Brubaker’s land on which Camp Security stood. Camp Security is the only Revolutionary War prisoner-of-war camp that has not totally fallen to development.
Springettsbury Township will keep the land as parkland, combining it with the present 11-acre Camp Security Park just to the north. According to a York Daily Record news story, the land is already accessible. The township asks that visitors park at the existing Camp Security Park parking lot at Eastern Blvd. and Locust Grove Rd.
It was a thrill today to finally be able to walk by the edge of the field, up the hill, through a small wooded area and into the field higher up the hill. You can get a sense of what was meant by those that recorded that part of the camp was on “a benchlike plateau.”
If you go, please be careful not to step on the growing corn–the property is leased to a farmer for a few more years. We don’t want him to have to file for corn damages, as did David Brubaker, the Lancaster County owner of the property during the 1780s. (See below for more on Brubaker and more photos.)
Also be very careful not to trespass on the adjoining farm–heed the no trespassing signs. If you walk (south) up the hill, stay to the left (east) of the treeline, and, again, don’t step on the corn.
Brubaker filed a claim on December 1781 with the Pennsylvania Provincial Council in December 1781, complaining 30 acres had been cleared of trees for material, his tenant’s Indian corn trampled and fence rails destroyed. He wanted those in charge of the camp to stop cutting trees, saying that 100 acres of the property had already been cleared before the camp had been established.
Ten years later, in 1791, David Brubaker was still petitioning the Pennsylvania government “praying compensations for a quantity of timber, furnished for the purpose of building stockades, huts &c. for the use of the British prisoners, during the late war.” So far I have seen no evidence that Brubaker was compensated.
View of upper field
View of adjacent upper field
Click the links below for previous Camp Security/Schultz House posts.
Former Rowe farm to become part of Camp Security Park.
Preservation in sight.
Hope for Camp Security.
Camp Security called “Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Another clue to Camp Security.
More to be explored.
Dig results at the Schultz House, the original 1750s house on the property.
Documenting Camp Security
Prisoner numbers hard to pin down.
Endangered historical site.
