Was the Town of Pleasant Garden planned with a River Bridge in 1793?
In previous posts I wrote about the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania act passed April 11th 1793, authorizing a Susquehanna River Bridge from Blue Rock, Lancaster County to Pleasant Garden, York County. This was the earliest river bridge authorized to York County and although the bridge was never built, the act provides some interesting details.
Pleasant Garden is currently the Long Level area of Lower Windsor Township; therefore by the act of April 11, 1793 a bridge across the Susquehanna River to this area of York County was authorized. This was sixteen years before the same process was started on the initial Susquehanna River Bridge from Columbia to Wrightsville.
In the files of the York County Heritage Trust is an old hand-drawn plan of the Town of Pleasant Garden; it is not dated. The developers of the Town of Blue Rock planned a town that started with 200-lots; maybe they were counting on the Susquehanna River bridge to connect to this layout of the Town of Pleasant Garden, which contains 175-lots.
In this post, I’ll present my research process in determining the location of the planned Town of Pleasant Garden. If the underlying 1953 Topographic Map looks familiar, it is the same area of Lower Windsor Township that I used in the background posts associated with my Dosch Burial Grounds talk “Private Burial Grounds, Discovering Their Stories.”
In document file # 23137 at the York County Heritage Trust is an old hand-drawn plan of the Town of Pleasant Garden. I’ve added typed street names in red, for easier reading on this copy; also notice that the River Susquehannah is along the bottom edge of the town plan.
Pleasant Garden is currently the Long Level area of Lower Windsor Township; therefore by the act of April 11, 1793 a bridge across the Susquehanna River to this area of York County was authorized. In my previous posts about this bridge, we learned that Jacob Dritt was an appointed commissioner for this bridge.
Jacob Dritt purchases nine islands in the Susquehanna River on August 9, 1793. These islands are noted as Tritt’s Islands on later maps. The planned bridge will pass over or close to these islands. The layout of the Town of Pleasant Garden was on Jacob Dritt’s land in this time period. With that the case, one would think that Jacob Dritt had a say in the layout, especially since my discovery that Lot # 1 happens to contain Dritt’s House.
My talk “Private Burial Grounds, Discovering Their Stories,” primarily dealt with the Dosch Burial Grounds in Lower Windsor Township. The Dosch lands adjoined Jacob Dritt’s lands and Jacob Dritt’s daughter Magdalena married Christopher Dosch. For that talk, I plotted many land deeds from present time back to the original land warrants in 1729.
As a result of the “Dosch Land Deed plots,” I suspected an approximate location for the Town of Pleasant Garden. However in an attempt to determine the exact location of the planned Town of Pleasant Garden, I expanded the search area of land deeds.
EUREKA, I found the key JACOB DRITT LAND DEED that, when plotted, matched the shape of the layout of the Town of Pleasant Garden. I’ll continue with this research find on Wednesday.
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