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Plumstead Historical Society local history collection
Notifications
Held at: Plumstead Historical Society [Contact Us]P.O. Box 1725, Plumsteadville, PA, 18949
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the Plumstead Historical Society. 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
"Plumstead Township [Bucks County, Pennsylvania] was...[established] shortly after 1700 by English Quakers...Plumstead Friends Meeting, founded in 1727, was the township's first religious establishment, but diversity soon followed. A German Mennonite church at Groveland was formed in 1806. Later settlements were Scottish and Irish, and eventually many of the township's inhabitants were of German extraction. Plumstead formed part of the border between areas primarily British and German in Bucks County.
"In 1725, a petition was presented by a group of residents to the Bucks County Court, organizing Plumstead Township. Already, small villages had begun to grow around the township to support what was at first an agricultural community. With the much traveled highway from Philadelphia to Easton, today's Route 611, running in a north-south direction and another main road running east and west, Point Pleasant Pike/Ferry Road, business and industry began to evolve. There were inns, blacksmiths, a gristmill, general stores and a large carriage works.
"...[Among] Plumstead's more famous residents were the Doan Gang, a group of...[outlaws renowned]...in the area during the latter part of the 18th century.
"...[As of 2014], Plumstead Township...has many of its farms still functioning...often [run] by families that have owned them for generations."
Bibliography:
Quoted text from: Plumstead Township. "History of Plumstead." Accessed March 11, 2014. http://www.plumstead.org/history.html.
This collection consists of various materials donated to or collected by the Plumstead Historical Society. It is a mixture of primary and secondary-source material relating to the history and residents of Plumstead Township.
Primary materials include daybooks (19th century), photographs, deeds, receipts and invoices, a large amount of cancelled checks and bank account records, correspondence, school report books and commencement programs, maps, nine oral histories (recorded on DVD, SD card, and a hard drive), watercolors and engravings, and other materials.
Secondary-source materials that are present include printed materials, ephemera, calendars, photocopies of original documents and photographs, narrative histories, newspaper clippings, a history and index of Plumstead Friends Meeting burial ground graves, and DVDs of Historical Society programs.
Materials collected from various sources, starting in 2012.
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 Plumstead Historical Society directly for more information.
- Publisher
- Plumstead Historical Society
- Finding Aid Author
- Finding aid prepared by Celia Caust-Ellenbogen and Sarah Leu 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 Plumstead Historical Society for information about accessing this collection.