A virtual photo tour – and an actual tour – of York County’s vintage Schultz House
Historic York is offering a tour of Springettsbury Township’s Johannes and Cristina Schultz House and surrounding buildings. The event is set for 5 p.m. (reception) and 6 p.m. (program), Thursday, May 15. Local author and blogger Scott Butcher
will present on “Historic Properties: The Ultimate Green Buildings.” To register, contact cjones@historicyork.org. (For five additional photos of this historic structure, see below.) Background posts: Old Schultz House might be younger than its datestone, Old house boasts all kinds of historic hooks and Virtual York provides colorful portrait of York, Pa.’s past.
At a recent event of the Schultz House, some astute folks started looking for the long-reported gun holes in the walls of the old house. The notion that has been out there for years is that settlers would use the holes in case American Indians attacked the mid-1700s vintage house… .
Historic York’s Barb Raid said an inspection brought no such holes.
But American Indians in this area did not represent such a threat to settlers that they would need such defensive means as holes in the walls through which to fire their guns.
The Susquehannocks, by then known as Conestogas, had long been weakened by disease and wars with other tribes.
Settlers could put down their stake after moving west of the Susquehanna River after 1730 without looking over their shoulders.
Spaces, a magazine published by the York Daily Record/Sunday News and the York Newspaper Co., featured the Schultz House in its April 2008 edition.
Photos (by Jason Plotkin) and captions from that magazine follow:
The Schultz House summer kitchen has an enormous oven. From the outside, it looks like a small schoolhouse or church with a bell on top that was used by the home’s most recent owners to announce dinnertime. It was likely built in the mid- to late-19th century.
The wide wooden planks in the Schultz House upstairs bedrooms slope across the floor but are still sturdy after more than 200 years.
The house’s ‘cave cellar’ was used to bury root vegetables in the back end, made of mud. The cellar is cool in the summer but floods with heavy rains.
The Schultz House is thought to be York County’s oldest two-story dwelling.
A datestone seems to say the Schultz House was built in 1734. Recent research puts the date a decade or more later.
