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Chester County Historic Preservation Office historic resource surveys for Phoenixville
Notifications
Held at: Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area [Contact Us]204 Church St., Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, 19460
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
Overview and metadata sections
Phoenixville has the largest registered historic district in Chester County, Pennsylvania. A few of the extant structures predate 1827, when the Phoenix Nail Factory and the village surrounding it were purchased by a Philadelphia iron manufacturing firm. Prior to 1850, most of the homes in the area were for low-wage workmen in the area's iron industry. Some larger, more elaborate houses were built by the iron company's executives. Closer to the turn of the century, houses from an expanding middle class filled out Phoenixville's landscape. Over the course of the 1900s, Phoenixville's prominent industrial presence began to fade, but it retained a vibrant commercial district in part due to the striking historical architecture extant.
The Phoenixville Historic District became a national historic district in 1987. The district, roughly bounded by Penn Street, the railroad tracks, Fourth Avenue and Wheatland Street, includes the former Phoenix Iron Works site and its employee and owner housing. At the time of nomination, it contained 908 contributing buildings, 52 non-contributing buildings, and one contributing structure (bridge).
Bibliography:
Clegg, Miriam. "Old Buildings with a Bright Future" and "More About Phoenixville's Old Buildings." Accessed September 24, 2013. http://www.hspa-pa.org/Phoenixville_old_buildings.html
This collection consists of historic resource survey forms for properties in Phoenixville, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Fieldworkers used Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) survey forms to document historic properties in 1985. On the forms fieldworkers provided the location, date of construction, condition, description, photographs, and other pertinent information about each property. The collection is organized by alphabetically by street name.
Summary descriptive information on this collection was compiled in 2012-2014 as part of a project conducted by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to make better known and more accessible the largely hidden collections of small, primarily volunteer run repositories in the Philadelphia area. The Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories (HCI-PSAR) was funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This is a preliminary finding aid. No physical processing, rehousing, reorganizing, or folder listing was accomplished during the HCI-PSAR project.
In some cases, more detailed inventories or finding aids may be available on-site at the repository where this collection is held; please contact Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area directly for more information.
Organization
Subject
Place
- Publisher
- Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area
- Finding Aid Author
- Finding aid prepared by Celia Caust-Ellenbogen and Faith Charlton through the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories
- Sponsor
- This preliminary finding aid was created as part of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories. The HCI-PSAR project was made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- Access Restrictions
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Contact Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area for information about accessing this collection.