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White Hall Hotel records
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Held at: Newtown Historic Association [Contact Us]Centre Avenue and Court Street, Newtown, Pennsylvania
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the Newtown Historic Association. 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
The White Hall Hotel is located at 127 South State Street in Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
"Isaac Hicks, father of Edward Hicks, lived in a frame house on this lot until 1836. During the Revolutionary War, the house was used as a store and was for a time occupied by the Quartermaster Department. During this period, the famous Bucks County outlaws, the Doan Brothers, raided the place, shot the watchman, and carried off some of the supplies.
"In 1852, the White Hall, then called Hallowell's Hotel, received its first liquor license under the proprietorship of Daniel Yerkes Harmon. Community pressure and petitions from Newtown residents forced the Court to withhold the license until 1858, when it was finally granted to Amos Buckman, then the proprietor. There were various owners up to 1891, when Sipron C. Keith bought the White Hall. Mr. Keith made extensive improvements and remodeled the entire structure. In 1923, the Chesner family purchased the inn and continued to operate it up until the 1970s. In 1979, the inn was gutted by fire and was restored to its original facade in the 1980s. It has since been converted into commercial/retail and office space."
Bibliography:
Quoted text from: Newtown Heritage Walk. "White Hall." Accessed February 1, 2013. http://www.newtownhistoric.org/heritagewalk.html
The collection consists primarily of ledgers with daily accounts, inventory lists, and employee records specifically for the taproom, kitchen, Windsock Aviation Cocktail Lounge, and Clouds Room of the White Hall Hotel. Also included is a scrapbook that consists primarily of cartoons clipped from the newspaper about aviation and the air force, circa 1945, as well as a box of ephemera. Lastly, there are two volumes of guest registers, 1897-1903. The last three pages of the second volume contain "signers for license," 1901-1903.
An item-level inventory for this collection is available in a database on-site.
Gift of Peter Chesner (accession 2011.0028).
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.
Detailed, computerized inventories of all of the items in this collection are available on site at the repository where this collection is held; please contact Newtown Historic Association directly for more information.
Organization
Subject
Place
- Publisher
- Newtown Historic Association
- 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 Newtown Historic Association for information about accessing this collection.