Manchester Township Historical Society

04/08/2025

'Tis the season...
Spring bulbs and forsythia are telltale signs of old homes and old foundations. When Gifford Pinchot State Park was constructed in the late 1950s, quite a few homes, barns, and other buildings were removed, but crews rarely took the time to remove shrubs and bulbs growing around those structures. Each spring, those flowering plants scream their presence and indicate locations of old foundations of buildings and families who once lived there. As you drive through wooded areas, be alert to the brilliant, yellow forsythia. Mystery awaits!

12/15/2024

MTHS just completed a new Profile, and this report details land in West Manchester Township. We started tracing the history of the Shiloh Ridge condo community behind Target, and we stumbled onto a 500-acre patent that took us back to one of William Penn's early purchasers in 1686. It's been an interesting trip.

For more than a decade, MTHS has traced the background of historic homes in, and around, Manchester Township in an effort to share the history of homes before we lose them. We haven't preserved many homes, but we are able to let folks know about the history they are losing.

Anyway, we have this latest report posted and ready for sharing. It contains many names familiar in the Manchester and West Manchester area, so if you're familiar with this area, you might bump into a few friends and neighbors.

Here's the link; enjoy.

12/09/2024

From our Cracker Barrel: Cool Them Chickens!

In 1923, Earl Hagarman, 21, and Arthur Miller,19, both of West York, decided to pedal across the country on their bicycles. They arrived in Omaha, Nebraska in late June of 1923 and were interviewed by a local newspaper reporter.

The reporter asked the young men if they encountered hot weather as they pedaled through Iowa. Hagarman said, “We did. It has been so hot the last three or four days that the farmers over there had to stay awake nights to feed the chickens cracked ice so they wouldn’t lay hard boiled eggs the next day.”

Apparently, hot days on a bicycle didn’t cool Hagarman’s sense of humor.

Browse our Cracker Barrel:

12/03/2024

Readers have asked how they can submit historic recipes to our list of old-time good eats. So, our Hand-Me-Down Recipe Department came up with this easy template. Actually, it's the template they use for all recipes but it has notes to explain what each part should include.

Don't worry about writing your info in the correct area. Just write it out in paragraph form and send it to us. Heck, you could just snap a quickie of your recipe book and our Editorial Department will take it from there.
Remember though. It's about "History." Food in the Old Days.

12/03/2024

Just a few weeks till Christmas, and it's time for COOKIES! Everyone makes a variety of delicious sugar cakes for the holidays, and there's probably not a better dunker in milk or coffee than a good sugar cake.

Here's a recipe from Maude Crisman of Fort Valley, Virginia. It's from our Hand-Me-Down recipe collection at MTHS. How does it compare to yours? Check it out:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nsIWxbyOKGsXgIZoN66KBYiZcNksbPrA?usp=drive_link

12/02/2024

MTHS is just coming out of hibernation. We’ve been working behind the scenes but doing a lousy job communicating with the outside world. Actually, that’s not a bad way to work, but two-way sharing is always better. So, we’re redoubling our efforts to share ideas, and Facebook is a large part of that effort.

We’ve taken a hard look at our online library of reports, docs, and other fun things. We’d like to make folks aware of what we have and offer free and easy access to other researchers who might contribute their own useful ideas.

For example, one section of the library contains old-fashioned recipes handed down from generation to generation. These recipes offer good eats and an impression of how folks ate in years past. We call this section---Hand-Me-Down Recipes. We currently have only a dozen recipes in the box, and we’d like many more.

Would you donate one or ten?

Take a look and enjoy.

02/09/2023

Green Acres

Historic Shady Lane of today was the Green Acres country home of Fred M. Small. Small was President of Martin-Parry Corporation in West York and had been president of Martin Carriage Works before it bought the Parry Corporation. He bought the estate in 1908 and owned it until his death in 1947. It was probably during this time that the Dempwolf architects redesigned the house and grounds into a stylish country manor.

We have a Profile on Frederick M. Small and his family. Read it here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1czciRTgZE61Ac2Igz1aY22JDYIcewuqN/view?usp=share_link

02/07/2023

MTHS Profiles

Much of what we do at MTHS is focused on deep-dive research on historic homes. We start with the deed to the current owners and trace the property back to the initial Penn warrant, or, even, presumptive settlers who lived on the land before the warrant was granted.

Along the way, we do brief genealogy of the owners in order to learn more about each family, all the time looking for anecdotes and other ideas that shed light on Manchester Township’s past. The network of marriages and connected families is always fun to explore with puzzles to unravel. That’s when our network of resource folks can be a huge help.

The final report on this research is a longer, more detailed document we call a “Profile.” It’s a profile of that home’s history and the families who owned it or lived there. This Profile, then, is linked onto the register entry for that home, and it becomes available to the homeowner, township staff and supervisors, and potential developers.

An example of a Profile is the one prepared for Jacob Hake’s estate in Manchester and East Manchester Townships. This warrant, survey, and patent were taken by James Smith, York attorney and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Today, this home is the center of Historic Shady Lane, a popular wedding venue.

Here’s a link to the Profile we developed for this historic home: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10LdSY0Flq0dZJwb_Y8pg2bqXxbiFvMEh?usp=sharing

02/07/2023

MTHS Glimpses

The paper on Jacob S. Good we recently posted is an MTHS Glimpse. These are relatively short papers on narrow topics. We have less than a dozen of these papers on topics of interest to folks familiar with Manchester Township.

For example, the photo here is the Aughenbaugh Meeting House along the Susquehanna Trail north of York. Attached to it is the Aughenbaugh Cemetery. We have several Glimpse articles that focus on this meeting house, and you can browse through all our Glimpse articles here:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AUmn934ISm9wp4bLI0S7ogV0QmEN1N-F?usp=sharing

02/04/2023

About Jacob S. Good

A few weeks ago, we offered to place historic homes on the Manchester Township Register of Historic Places anywhere in the county with only an address of that home or site. We’ve received quite a few.

One of them was the Peter Good house in East Manchester Township. Peter Good bought the estate of about 300 acres in 1762 while he was living in Martic Township, Lancaster County. When he died in 1823, his estate was divided into three sections each taken by one of his sons.

One son, Henry, died in 1869, and the disposition of his farm of just over 100 acres is an poignant story of a family who were their own worst enemies.

Read this Glimpse of Jacob S. Good.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oYbyy4VKUMQWACAKLmElaXO0Ytz6Kguz/view?usp=sharing

01/27/2023

An Update from the Manchester Township Historical Society -

01/20/2023

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