Look at an old map of York County. You will see names of areas, perhaps very near where you live, that you have never heard of. It might have been a flourishing area at one time with a general store where you could buy just about anything, a post office,
A few weeks ago I posted the tale of Spoonie Gohn’s supposed encounters with Slaymaker’s ghost at Margaretta Furnace. I had initially shared that story with the attendees at the York Daily Record annual Unraveling York County History night in early December. Margaretta Furnace with the grand mansion house and
I have written before about York’s multitalented William Wagner. One of his lasting legacies as an engraver is the Map of York and Adams Counties that he published with Daniel Small in 1821. This map is still very useful today to locate sites important to our local history. The map
A few months ago I did a post on Henry Smeych, who claimed to have captured John Wilkes Booth’s horse on which Booth escaped after assassinating President Lincoln. At 87, Smeych, born in Chanceford Township in October 1837, talked at length about his adventurous life in a lengthy piece in
Biesecker’s Mill on the Little Conewago York County Heritage Trust will launch its latest publication, Millers’ Tales: The Mills of York County, this Saturday, November 27 with a public program. The event will be held a 1 p.m. at the Trust’s Agricultural and Industrial Museum, 217 W. Princess St., York.
Philip A. Small examining Christian Roth’s wheat Whenever I start researching some York County history, it seems like someone from the Small family turns up. Pennsylvania German immigrant Lorentz Small settled in Windsor Township in 1743, but soon the family became involved in carpentry, building, mills, iron furnaces, retail and
Pass issued to Samuel Small by General Early’s aide-de-camp. Did one of P.A. & S. Small’s grist mills burn during the Civil War? Yes. Was it burned by the General Jubal Early’s Confederate soldiers? No. Fellow blogger Scott Mingus has already posted information on the Small mills during the June
I was researching something else on newspaper microfilm the other day, but with the current price of gold over $1,200 an ounce, the article below caught my eye. It is from the July 31, 1934 issue of the York Dispatch. I would say the paper mill owners were very generous,
The real estate notice below, from the November 7, 1816 York Gazette, is a great example of the wealth of information available in newspapers from the past. Such descriptions are often detailed, giving us an idea of how our forebears lived and worked. You can see by the headline that
It was 1908. Although their families had been immigrants only a hundred years or so before, some York County people weren’t too sure about the new immigrants coming in to work at plants, mills and quarries or to build roads. These new arrivals weren’t of German, English and Scots-Irish stock