The bilingual notice above (transcribed below) illustrates two points. One is that, because the great majority of 18th century York County residents were from the Germanic lands of Europe, official notices were printed in German as well as English, as shown by this broadside. It was printed by Edie and
The General Gates house is one of York County Heritage Trust’s historic restorations. It is so named because it is said to have been the residence of Horatio Gates when he served as president of the Board of War [forerunner of the Defense Department] during part of the time Continental
A lot of towns have Carnegie public libraries, funded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Did you ever wonder why York County doesn’t have a Carnegie funded library? Carnegie’s biographer credits him with building over 2,800 free libraries with about 1,950 of them in the United States. It seems that one was
It’s soon income tax time again. There was no federal income tax 200 years ago, but that doesn’t mean that you didn’t have to pay taxes to support the United States government. Not having strong taxing ability was one of the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. It was unbelievably
The Lewis Miller drawing above is often seen around Christmas. It is said to be one of the first known American depictions of a Christmas tree. As with many of Miller’s illustrations of York County Life in the first half of the 19th century, there is more than one thing
Every April our thoughts, mostly bad, turn to taxes. Back in 1833, Peter Bott got really upset when he was passed over for tax collector of West Manchester Township.