Roads to Taverns to Towns

good evening welcome my name is andrew dalton and i'm the executive director of the adams county historical society here in gettysburg pennsylvania i'm joined here with tim smith our historian and we are back for our weekly program this one is live so we'll be watching your your comments and questions along the way if you can let us know if you can hear and and see us all right we always like to check in the beginning and make sure everything is going well but it looks like everything is good from what i'm seeing so thanks again for for joining us tonight's program will be the next installment of our series on our new museum that we're building and actually have a picture of our new building behind me it'll be a two-story education center museum and research archive it'll be the new home of the adams county historical society just located just north of gettysburg and we've announced our plans for the museum as well as all the other components and we're in the middle of a capital campaign so if you donate tonight there's actually a 500 match so any dollar that you give to us tonight will be matched and the the funds will help support our new building and i also want to thank the dobbin house tavern our sponsor for all of these programs uh thanks again i see everybody saying they can hear and see okay but we're excited to to be with you again to do another program on what we're highlighting in our new museum and adams county historical society has no shortage of stories and artifacts that we want to highlight we have millions of historic items in our collection and we're going to be putting some of our rarest artifacts in our new museum and we're highlighting the entire history of the gettysburg area back to prehistoric times so you'll be able to get that broad more complete story that many of you may not have seen before so the museum will be separated into nine different sections and what we've been doing every month is bringing a different section worth of material and putting it into a program and tim is actually the principal author and and lead designer for the museum i should say lead historian not doing any graphic design but uh we're actually working with a wonderful company to put in this museum healy kohler out of washington d.c and this firm actually is responsible for doing the museum of the american revolution in philadelphia so it's a privilege to work with their experienced and uh really excellent group of of of museum designers so tonight we're going to be talking about an early chapter of adams county history we're going to talk about the first roads that were laid out leading through what is now adams county we're going to talk about the taverns that were established along those roads and then and then we're going to talk about the towns that came about because of these these taverns and these prominent intersections so we're going to talk about things you may have heard of like the gettys family and the the samuel and james gettys tavern we're going to talk about some other places as well around the county and it'll kind of give you an idea of what life was like for the earliest residents of the area and we're going to bring some photos to you from our collection that some you probably have never seen before that show really rare items from this period of time that we have here at the adams county historical society so i hope you'll hit the donate button tonight if you enjoy the post and i think facebook has a new feature where you can send stars so whatever that is we we appreciate it um and i guess i'll turn it over to tim now to give us an idea of what we're going to be talking about and we'll get right into some of these really great photos and artifacts and stories that we have well i think um you know the top the topic uh towns to taverns or i should say uh roads to taverns to towns uh is kind of uh you know what happens in all uh early communities so as early settlers moved into the area they needed to have roads and of course these things started off as wagon paths but then you know as part of lancaster county roads were officially formed at the county level and they were you know laid out and designed in york county when this is your county we have a bunch of roads laid out and just to give you an idea of the road system in this area we have this map that's actually from the history of adams county by robert bloom and it talks about some of the early roads and the earliest confirmed road that was actually officially laid out was the monocacy road about 1740 and of course that goes from york down through abbotstown and hanover and across through littlestown and down towards the monocacy river in maryland and of course this trace of that road was on top of uh a route that had been used for you know centuries by you know native americans that lived in that area uh to travel you know to the nocatee river and back and forth towards uh pennsylvania in 1747 we had uh the um two roads laid out one we kind of called the marsh creek road and the other one kind of splits all from it's called the uh blacks gap road and basically these were roads that come out of york pennsylvania and then come across through abbott's town and later what would be new oxford and then they split off at today's swift run road west of new oxford the northern path running uh across with a swift run road and then shriver's corner road and then goldenville road and hilltown road and out to the mountain pass and then the southerly route passing through what is what is later gettysburg and down through woods later fairfield and down to nichols gap or nicholson's gap as it's known on some of the early maps i should mention that the early roads were predominant predominantly east west roads in our area but following the french and indian war and the emergence of baltimore as a major seaport we have more roads that run in a north-south direction and of course these roads crossed each other and created intersections uh we talked about this in our program last month when we're talking about the early settlement of the county and it's uh the skull map of pennsylvania this is a 1770 version i believe and on this map you can kind of see uh some of the early roads that were well used and established by that time on the map including the three roads i just uh mentioned we do have the oxford road north south road in 1762 and of course the baltimore shippensburg road we're going to talk about laid out in 1769 it's not shown on this map but here i just blocked in uh the monocacy road uh and uh the marsh creek road in the middle of the map and uh above it is uh the minowin road that's laid out in 1750 and that's the road that leads from the area of york over to the manellan meeting house and that's basically uh 234 today the manila meeting house originally being in the area where center mills is now located and that's a prominent location for the underground railroad and the quaker community that we'll be talking about i think at the the next program next month very good now uh in we don't have a lot of these early documents in our collection because you know this is your county at that time and prior to that in lancaster county but in the york county archives they have this incredible survey of the baltimore shippensburg road and many people out there have been in my lectures and heard me uh discuss this map and we've known about it for many years it's been the copy of it has been in our collection i'm really hoping that in the new museum we can get a really nice version of it for the wall but basically it runs from the maryland line uh through gettysburg and then runs up of course through um mummasburg and uh it goes up and you know through the narrows and up and over uh big flats to that thriving metropolis shippensburg and early on in pennsylvania's history shippensburg was a very important town and it wasn't until chambersburg was later established then chambersburg became a more important gateway to the west but shippensburg in its uh early inception was one of the major towns in uh pennsylvania leading uh to the western pennsylvania but on this particular tracing i actually have shown on here the area from just south of rock creek to um just north of what you know would become gettysburg in 1769 and you can see i really like it because it does show uh samuel gaddis's tavern at the north uh west intersection of the original baltimore shippensburg road and uh on this map you can actually see the mcallister's mail um on rock creek it's called samuel gaddis's mill we know that samuel getty's owned the area the mill along rock creek that would later become mcallister's mail he probably had a um a wooden mill there i think the stone mill that was there at the time of the battle isn't built until a little later but uh um you can see it on that map and i think it's kind of interesting it shows it also along the baltimore shippensburg road right above it if you look at the map at the bottom you can see laughlin mcvay's house and laughlin mcvay's house still stands from the 1769 map let's go to the next one good and i think we might be having a little internet trouble so we are sorry about that we'll try to get that figured out here while we're going um this is the spangler house as it's better known at as we generally refer to farms around the area by their civil war name because obviously they appear on maps associated with the battle and they're given the names of the people who live there at the time but this house along the baltimore pike which is near it's across the street from near the entrance to the gettysburg national military park foundation museum it's just a little north of there uh this house is on that 1769 map and the wooden part of the house the log structure to the right there's every reason to believe that that may date from the early period of settlement or at least the house sits on the exact spot as the first house you know uh maybe i'll talk about it later but oftentimes the houses we see today or the second or third structure that was built on that site and not necessarily the earliest structure you don't start off building a really nice big stone house you probably have a small log cabin and then uh you know and then another frame building and then maybe a stone or a brick dwelling later uh but that's that's a really one of the early houses also on this map uh just uh south and west of the baltimore shippensburg uh road on this map you'll see john carson john carson sold his property to alexander dobbin now again this is from 1769 and we know that um alexander dauben builds his large stone house in 1776. so if we go to the next one i have always thought that this house that once stood where the avenue restaurant is today on uh steinway avenue that this could quite possibly be uh the original john carson house an old log house uh when it was torn down in early 1900s there was an article in the newspaper that talked about it being over 150 years old at that time so uh here's a picture of maybe one of the early houses in the area now there are a couple vestiges of the baltimore shippensburg road that you can see around the area one of them is uh wainwright avenue at the base of cemetery hill originally the baltimore shippensburg right baltimore shippensburg road came into the town at the base of cemetery hill and uh it wasn't until the early 1800s that they rerouted it up and over cemetery hill near the evergreen cemetery gatehouse and then down into what would become baltimore street so this uh trace of that road was at the bottom of cemetery hill at the time of the battle and that's uh the 11th corps lined up on it became sort of a part of the entrenchments for the 11th army corps uh on the evening of july 2nd but uh another interesting thing you can see is an old road marker for the baltimore shippensburg uh pike and um this is uh a picture of the what is commonly referred to as jenny wade's birthplace uh on the corner of baltimore street and wade avenue and wade avenue is about where the baltimore shippensburg road originally hit the town uh when it was established in 1786. we do not know uh when the first mark was placed there but uh for many many years um you know i have stopped at that location all my tours and i always mentioned there's a little stone marker that says sits at the corner of the building next to the uh usually the telephone pole in this photograph and it it says on it 52 m to b what i did not realize until many years later is that that marker was placed there and it replaced another marker that had been at that site as long as anyone could remember and again you know it was probably the modern was modern markers placed there like in the 1920s or 30s but here in our collection we do have the original marker that was at that location was donated to us by the person who lived on that site and it you can see it says 52 m2b 52 miles to baltimore from that site and this marker probably dates from the 1700s but um we just don't we just don't have any account of it and we don't know we do have some artifacts associated with the early roads and here's an artifact that we're going to highlight on a museum i believe and it's the grading book for the chambersburg turnpike or what uh they referred to as the western extension right of the you know baltimore right um and it might even in this one they might even call it the gettysburg petersburg turnpike company because petersburg is another name for early littlest town and they all then when they establish the turnpike company and this is modern route 30 west yeah and so this is a survey book for the modern uh uh you know roughly around 30 west through the uh out through the cashtown pass at least to where it meets up with the old blacks gap road and it's really fascinating because it gives you the courses and distances of the road and in the column beside it it tells you uh prominent places that they're past passing like for instance willoughby's run with an apostrophe yes is mentioned by name in this book and they talk about uh um i think maybe clarkson's farm or actually at that time mcconaughey's farm which would be later become the macpherson farm and they talk about passing miles sweeney's lane and miles sweeney lived on her ridge and it's just fabulous for me to actually get the names of the houses that the road is passing through and again they just took like some farmland and just cut a road through there you know they uh they would pay the property owners for their damages and they laid out this road prior to this road being laid out between like 1812 and 1815 if you wanted to get to chambersburg you would have had to go up to baltimore shippensburg road to mamasburg and then across what is called blacks gap road today's uh hilltown road to get to that area right and we have some uh we have an early receipt book associated with that turnpike we have um some stock uh notices from that turnpike it's kind of fascinating we have quite a bit of information about that particular road and it was a private road established by a group of people that had it they had an it had it incorporated through the pennsylvania state legislature and they sold stock and they charged a fee to use the road and there were toll gates along the road and then they had meetings and they the profits were passed out to the stockholders right and one of the toll gates for this is a long willowby run it's still standing just uh east of willoughby's run yeah on the chambersburg pike so yeah a lot of you probably know that structure and we have a i i put a picture of one of them in there oh i didn't do we got marsh creek i think that's the next one okay so they built a bridge over some of the major creeks in these roads and here is the bridge on route 30 over marsh creek so this is the bridge and this would be this is probably an 1890s photograph i believe and this of course would be the bridge the confederate army crossed over on their way to gettysburg on july 1st and of course near where the first shot of the battle was fought we have a few photographs of the original bridge before of course it was expanded and improved there's only a couple of these original stone bridges left i think in the county maybe just two or three yeah but they're beautiful these arched bridges the one uh over bermudian creek uh comes to mind on um is that uh oh my god vladimir putin does know every road in adams county yes here's the cash town tailgate right so here's the toll gate that stood at uh cash town and this would stand we're looking uh west and to the left just before the tollgate house is the road that leads over to ortana so we're sort of in a downtown cash town there and we have a number of photographs of this toll gate that stood there at one time now of course people didn't like panatol so they would avoid it and it's interesting that one of the earliest illustrations of our town done in 1841 and here is uh and this is published in an 1843 book and it actually shows the town of gettysburg and it shows a wagon riding on the railroad uh the unfinished railroad that was uh you know started in 1835 and by 1839 it was condemned so the chambersburg pike would be like off to the right of the view and people are you know getting around paying the toll probably by riding on the unfinished railroad bed right no easy pass now i also wanted to make uh make mention of the fact that once adams county is established we do have road dockets for roads that were established in our county at the county level and this is a illustration of the wheat field road and so at the bottom of the map is the area around west confederate avenue or around the uh mississippi and louisiana monument and were actually going east as you go north along the road and it crosses the emmitsburg road it's from the 1840s and it shows the owners of the property on both sides of the road it shows the valley of death uh owned by hauck and mccrary and it actually uh for those of you who know about my obsession with the rock in the road there's a rock identified in the middle of that uh um what really yeah i think it is the rock in the road it's used as a landmark to determine where the road goes right and then of course that road you can see at the top of it is the tony town road and then it kind of went up a little bit and went on to uh saks road it was the road from nana maker's mail uh to um i forget the the horner's mill perhaps so it it goes across and then up what is saks road and then out into mount joy township but we do have the original document for the stretch of the road that today we refer to as the wheat field road somebody's asking do we have a sense of how long it would take to put in a road like no route 30 no i imagine we're talking well you know the the stretch of the road uh from um gettysburg out to the western uh you know the western boundary of adams county i think they refer to it in 1809 they passed an act with the state's legislature establishing the turnpike company for that section of the road and i think they started laying it out in 1812 and i think it was completed in 1815 but i don't know how fast they worked how many people they had you know their progress it's it's so early there's not updates on the road in the newspaper that we can read and and find out about it right yeah now also i wanted to mention that you know you put in roads you have settlers the settlers demand roads and then the settlers also demand goods and services if you live in this area and you'd like to buy something at what we would call early hardwood hardware store do you ride to york or lancaster and then bring this stuff back in a wagon it makes sense for people to open up shops and businesses to sell things to the local community and so we had stores and then of course we had taverns they would uh produce alcohol and so we have a lot of early taverns in the area along these roads and of course the taverns also could be a place where people would spend the night but also they were areas where you could congregate uh the local community could congregate at a spot right yeah i think it's too when we talk about these early settlements i think people imagine a cluster of houses but it's really spread out and so before there were towns it was just you know you'd have to travel quite a ways to get from one house to the next and this is where people came and they got their news too a lot of times and we know the early you know newspapers and media in the county started out in taverns and think about this the stage coaches went from tavern to tavern right and it makes sense that the stage coach would go from tavern to tavern because that they weren't a schedule people needed to eat so they would pick a tavern and the people would eat there on the stagecoach ride from one place to another and then also if it was a night they would use the taverns and they would spend the night for lodging but also what ended up happening was the stagecoaches would deliver things to the taverns that people had ordered so the mail would come in on the stagecoach and the news would come in on the state coach and maybe there was a bulletin board in front of the tavern or in the tavern that listed all the things that were happening happening nationwide and it would deliver newspapers to the tavern and you might go to the tavern to pick up your um your newspaper if you wanted to learn about the events that were taking place now on this map that we blew up i put i i just underlined two of the early major taverns i believe their taverns in this area and one of them is nicholas ryland now again this is early and we here don't have the tavern licenses in adams county but uh nicholas ryland did run a tavern we know he has a tavern license in new york county records and then uh john hamilton actually had a tavern and it's interesting his tavern is located near the intersection of swift run road and the marsh creek road and always you know driving through that area i try to imagine where that original uh foundation or where that actual tavern was located but somewhere uh around that intersection you can see on the map now we we have a program on early taverns in the area in the history of some of the taverns that you can find on our youtube page that one of our members has conducted so really good program so we're not going to cover the same material but we wanted to talk about some of the things we're going to highlight in our museum there's a program on roads too we should point out so we have one program all about roads and one about taverns but uh today we're kind of giving a more broad look at this period of time but this is this is one of my favorite artifacts in the collection one of the things we're going to put on display in the museum and we've always talked about putting this on display is the sign for the cross keys tavern and here you can see the sign 1809 the cross keys and at the bottom henry get and beside it i put what we have in one of the items in our collection it's the tavern license for henry get from 1809 and it says he had a tavern in berwick township and of course oxford township had not been formed yet and so this is all part of berwick uh township although cross keys you probably know is right at the intersection of berwick township and oxford township and um we have a tavern license for every year uh early in these uh records uh that our tavern license collection stops in the 1850s about 1850 1851 i think so so we don't have the tavern license at the time of the battle people always asked us about that if we have some of the county tavern license from the civil war we do not but we have a good amount of them and i think in the late 1820s there is a specific tavern license from henry get that says his tavern is located at the sign of the cross keys so that area across keys which is for those of you who might not know uh just east of um uh new oxford kind of between new oxford and abbotstown uh at one point across keys tavern and then later the cross keys hotel was there i think we have a photograph of it right uh this is the cross keys hotel um this is the brethren home right right on that interstate it is right on the intersection where the brethren home is located i like to point out too with the cross keys the you know a lot of early settlers were speaking different languages not all of them were fluent in english and a lot couldn't read or write and so it was a lot easier to explain in any language where the cross keys tavern was based on the picture but this is a beautiful old wooden sign that we have in our collection that's just beautifully preserved so you'll have to stop by our new museum and see the original you can't tell in that photograph but that thing is huge we cannot lift it by ourselves all right good good and oh one other thing and uh maybe for homework let's go to the next one okay maybe for homework if you go out to the intersection near that tavern there's a road marker there for the uh um uh gettysburg york turnpike and the road marker says we should see if they can guess this one a well it looks like uh i i didn't i don't know who chalked it in but it says p 108 y 22 g six let's see if people can get that one i think they can get it we'll see if anybody in the comments can can figure that one out but these road markers there are several in the county and this is a good one you can see if you can stop the dead light uh you know and you're on your way to abbotstown or york look over to the right and you'll see it's sitting there it's amazing uh it's still there at that location um of course we have other taverns in the area we have a lot of taverns the mcclellans had a tavern along the fairfield road at uh marsh creek we have a descendant actually ralph mcclellan's watching tonight he just said yeah oh and so this is an 1880s image we're not sharing the exact date but uh of the black horse tavern that was owned by the mcclellans for many years of course uh william b mcclelland then opened up tavern and gettysburg and in 1842 upon mcclellan's death it was actually purchased by francis bream and he was the sheriff of adams county and he had a tavern i like to point out in this view that um the stone building still stands but the building to the left which undoubtedly is the earlier original log cabin was torn down many many years ago and no longer stands good and here is a tavern license i i don't see the year i don't know if you can read the year andrew oh we got some answers we have philadelphia york and gettysburg yes it's true but you can see uh william mark mcclellan 1820. signature there for 1820 and that's a a tavern license so we have early tavern licenses for many of the taverns in the area here is uh the henry tavern and of course uh henry had a tavern at you know what would later become new oxford right and uh of course uh the fairfield end this is the only one we've shown so far that is still standing oh the fairfield i think uh of the once well the one the one uh uh the one the one some of them are they're greatly renovated but the tavern is greatly greatly renovated yes yeah but yeah they're fair fairfield maintains a lot of its original character structure yeah and then uh i just threw this one in because it's it's a later one not talking it's not the early period that we've been talking about but in 1829 they laid out the newville road which connected gettysburg north out of out of gettysburg out to the newville today we called carlisle street and sometimes referred to it as the carlyle road but it was table rock road that was actually the carlisle road and this road went up and over the mountains through pine grove furnace and out towards newville and so this is the uh bendersville sometimes you here called the elkhorn tavern um it was the city tavern it was the bendersville station for a while somebody asked earlier was there an early tavern at heidlersburg yes very good there was a tavern at heidlersburg and as a matter of fact if you go to the intersection of heidlersburg we're talking about the intersection of 234 and the old harrisburg road it would be at the north east corner of the intersection and there is some woods there today but now i'm sure it's private property but if you were to go up and over there is a foundation where the tavern used to be and i think it was run by the starry founder look at that tim is an excellent i know the answer to that question so and then you know we have other uh places that are could be termed more resorts like the york sulphur springs and this is a fascinating image because this is also from that book from 1843 and it's in 1841 illustration of the york sulphur springs and this had been around for many years prior to that as a matter of fact i i think one of their local legends has it that george washington and his wife visited the york sulphur springs i i i don't know about the exact source for that information but but uh you know it was there uh for many years prior to this 1841 illustration and it's fascinating along what uh would be um the baltimore road at that time that led from carlisle out across through you know what is now york springs through hanover and down towards baltimore and of course you know talking about the error we're discussing this is the russell tavern on goldenville road and again goldenville road is a 1747 road and we don't have a lot of records from this early time period so we do not know when this site was built or when it was first used as a tavern but this is joshua russell's tavern and the lady in the photograph is harriet hamilton bailly who for you civil war buffs you might remember she left an account of uh the battle around her farm a couple miles from this uh tavern and i think on the caption of the photograph did we have it says that um joshua russell was her granddad or her great-grandad and of course this is the spot where george washington spent the night uh when he was uh president and traveling back it was his second time through adams county right yeah we had the first time he traveled through littlest i don't remember the days off the time i had to do i was going to look it up we'll get back to you in the 1790s yes so george washington passed through the county at least twice and you know uh if the york sulphur springs story uh is correct that will be a a different uh visit so um uh but there's no doubt about it you know oh we got the dates okay october 25th 1794. uh but he had already passed through adams county july 2nd in 1791 that's when he passed through littlestown and i do that he write about littlest i do know that there is a mention in his diary about passing through the little town and he said it was not much of a town at that time he wasn't very complementary to little's town and his we still love littlest yes great um of course what ended up happening was a lot of these taverns were at intersections and sometimes the tavern owner sometimes uh you know someone purchased the area around the tavern and they laid out early towns uh so a lot of the towns uh taverns and churches were established nearby turned out to be the sites of early towns and of course um we have the town of gettysburg uh samuel gettys and um his uh i don't know why i put the lottery map there but we'll go to the next one so um this is a 1765 uh survey of samuel geddes property so we know by 1765 we have proof that he was in this location i think uh we know from the york county records that by 1762 he has a tavern uh along the marsh creek road but this is a 1765 survey and at some point uh he builds a tavr in there and in 1769 a few years later an intersection is created near his tavern when the baltimore shippensburg road was laid out and i think some of the early records allude to the fact that when they are placing early roads and laying out early roads that they make it a point to pass by taverns so play so it was probably no coincidence when they're not laying out the road that it ended up going by that tavern of course you know as historians of the battle we recognize the fact that when they laid out this intersection that actually ended up resulting in the battle being fought here because that intersection will blossom into a network of ten roads that would lead the armies into this area during the gettysburg campaign so it's a very important event in our history 1769. so uh we mentioned taverns were meeting places for the local community oftentimes um there was estate sales or public sales of property or share of sales and these these officers of the courts for the counties would ha would meet in taverns we see in the newspaper there's lots of accounts where um uh militia are ordered to all the people who were of age to be in the militia were ordered to meet at these taverns to practice and parade and uh you know every a few times a year all the males of a certain age would have to get together and be enrolled in militia and in 1775 it was samuel gettys tavern where a group of marsh creek settlers formed a company and actually traveled to massachusetts uh with to join george washington's army around boston right it's amazing i think that's the only structure really in what we now consider the town of gettysburg at that time and then of course the following year the dobbin house was built which is currently the oldest building in the town yeah and right you know both of those kind of are off right off of the main road the dobbin house set back on a probably a long driveway but it's amazing to think about that uh you know all this happening inside the tavern these conversations about the revolution and and uh the forming of the this unit and of course that original tavern no longer stands it's basically near where the parking garage is located in racehorse alley uh just north of york street now samuel gaddis had some financial difficulties and there was an auction of his property and in 1785 his son james purchased uh 116 acres of land with the tavern around an intersection and he actually laid out 210 town lots and you can see from this survey done at the time you can see the intersection of the york nichols gap road and what they say on this map the black scap road which is basically the baltimore shippensburg road now we have an illustration of james getting and since we're putting this museum together i've really tried to find a really nice version of this photograph we have two of them in our collection and you can see one of them on the left is from an early booklet done by the gettysburg compiler in illustration a sort of uh what would you call this an etching or a photograph yeah um yeah or not really a lithographic it might be maybe they're based on a painting yeah but on our right is one that comes to us from the gettysburg national bank collection since he was early officer of the gettysburg national bank but there is an image that's a little bit better that comes from the gettys family in tennessee and i have here the guy's name who gave it to the james gettys hotel in 2000 boy we'd really like it if somebody knows who this is a guy named cook robert joseph cook and um uh you know maybe there's a painting of the founder of our town out there available somewhere now james gettis laid out the town uh and then when it became the county seat in 1800 he became uh he he actually was able to have gettysburg named the county seat in 1803 he became the sheriff of adams county he actually in 1790 had built another brick tavern on york street and here's a couple images of it from the gettysburg compiler well i must have taken the other one out that's right this is uh we uh just a few years ago um one of the ghettos descendants sent us uh his sheriff's book while he's a sheriff of adams county from 1803 until like 1807 and it has the notes of his financial activities i guess the sheriff when there's a property sale or if somebody had been convicted of a crime and had to page court costs or there was a lawsuit between parties the sheriff had to go and collect the money from that person and then give it to the uh court or the person that the money was owed this was just given to us recently too which is amazing a few years ago discovered by the family in tennessee i think and it's it's really nice um we also have sheriff's deeds right and this is a from like 1805 it's a james gettis signed sheriff's deed for property that he sold at a public sale we also have from one of the grandchildren of um the gettys family a family bible that lists samuel geddes's children and their dates of birth and if it wasn't for this bible with this page in it to list these we would not know the brothers and sisters of james geddes and this will definitely be in the new museum and it'll definitely be a new museum we have several artifacts associated with gettys including this chair that i believe went from getting us through thaddeus stevens actually ended up with david wills to david wales oh they wills to uh to us yeah yeah probably a beautiful chair it has the david will's daughter actually wrote her name i think in paint on the bottom of the chair which is amazing yeah this will certainly be in the in the new museum we have very few artifacts from the actual things you can imagine we're talking about a period this is very little early yeah and then of course you know james gettys was originally buried at the presbyterian church upper marsh creek presbyterian church in the cemetery on belmont road and in 1865 his body was moved to evergreen cemetery and a large monument was placed on his grave i want to point out in that um in the back of that photograph you can see there is another stone and that's um james gettys had a few children and um uh we'll get to the next blow up of the dog not yet not yet okay and so this is the jane one of james get us his children he had james getting junior which moved uh to tennessee and robert getting that died here in 1827. tim's favorite poem and of course on his tombstone is probably my favorite poem of all time this will be the poem on tim's headstone remember me as you pass by as you are now so once was i as i am now so shall they'll be prepare for death and follow me and we won't read the rest of you could not see but tim was not looking at the screen when he read that so this is internalized we love these old uh epitaphs i guess yeah epitaphs that are on a lot of the stones if you walk through evergreen cemetery you'll see a similar poem just about uh on a lot of these older stones now on the stone there is a really nice relief of james gaddis and we might use that in our museum but uh here's another view of the stone and of course the dog and uh a local story that and we're not even sure how old the story is but it's been told for years and years and years is that uh james gettis was the founder of the town and he pretty much ran to town and then it became the county seat and in 1806 it became an incorporated borough and there was a town council and one of the first things the town's council did was pass an ordinance making you license your dog apparently there was a big problem with stray dogs in the street and you were taxed for your dogs james gettys had a number of dogs and he wasn't very happy about paying the tax so he got a collar for his dogs and the caller said hello i am james gettys dog whose dog are you [Laughter] and the story goes that this dog at the cemetery was wearing that collar and years ago someone stole it off the door and the dog is awesome the dog was eventually also stolen it's a cast iron greyhound dog and we know a little bit about it because there's an exact replica of that in how long ago was that soul and tim do you think um i think it was in 19 well there were two of them in our cemetery and i think they were stolen in the 70s and in the 80s that's too bad well if anyone sees it or finds it it's out there please let us know um we have other towns that were formed in the county that have similar stories you know we don't have many photographs of the founders of these early towns so here i put a couple that we do have on the left is uh john arndt of artsville and uh on the right is uh uh william miller of fairfield and william miller was also a revolutionary war veteran and there's a great account where he is at the battle of trenton and he was in washington's crossing of the delaware wonderful new oxford here's an early deed for a lot in new oxford uh laid out in 1792 and we actually have if we go to the next one um a book that is the original lottery book from new oxford and i should mention we i didn't put it in here but we also have a lottery map from the town of gettysburg which we've talked about on other occasions that will be featured in our museum but this map shows the number of the lottery ticket and the number of the lot and it was a lottery held and they must have spun around you know two barrels with numbers in them and one of them you pulled out the number of the lottery ticket that you had and then the other one they pulled out the number of lot that you want there was a way to create interest in establishing a town by selling tickets to the town lots and you would buy the option to purchase the lot that you won in the lottery right uh here's littlestown deed littlestown's laid out in 1765 and off the top my head abbottstown is the oldest established town in adams county and again this is your county at the time um hunters town is laid down in 1764. i think east berlin or berlin is 1764. mcsherry's town and littlestown are 1765. so this is a 1769 deed for littlest town signed by uh peter little right or peter klein this is 20 years before gettysburg is established yeah it is interesting with some of these early towns now littlestown's on the early road that we talked about that passes through the southern corner of the county that was a native american path we believe before that yeah and uh one other thing i like about that um that of deed it's actually printed it's not a you can see that it's a printed deed with information out in it and it says clearly on it that was printed by the ephrata cloisters press wow which is fascinating that's amazing let's go to the next one that will probably be in the museum okay so now revolutionary war figures obviously we don't have a lot of illustrations of them but we do have one and that's john troxell and we have this original photograph that came to us from the family and of course there's lots of family of john troxler we'll talk about in a moment but we have that original frame photograph and i pulled it out of the frame about two years ago and prior to that i don't know when the last time was out of the frame it has all this genealogical information on the back of the image and we do know that john trox i should mention that there's a couple books that have used that as someone else and it's gotten on the internet on find a grave as someone else but no that's john troxell the first settler of gettysburg let's go to the next slide we have uh we have a few different photographs of him you can see the photograph on the left is from our collection it is a different version of the photograph than the one i showed earlier and you know he laid out lots in the town adjacent to james gaddis troxel's edition which pretty much is west middle street and west high street he also we have a chair from him and we have a fabulous grandfather clock from john troxell and that clock's in storage we're excited to get it out of storage i believe i have not seen that clock in uh almost a decade right yeah we should point out we'll talk a little bit more at the end but we have a significant amount of artifacts that we're going to be getting out of storage in the next few months here so we're excited to show you what we find when we start opening crates so also now i should preface this on his tombstone we're going to see it says the first settler of gettysburg what that means is after james gettis established a town in 1786 he was the first person to purchase a lot in the town and build a house and in december of 1786 abraham troxell was born and he abraham troxel is the first male child that says male child maybe there's a maybe there was a female child the first male child born in the town and he died in baltimore in 1875. and you see a photograph an illustration of him on uh the left and on the right there's a photograph of him sometimes this photograph is misidentified as john troxl also but it's his son abraham so here's the tombstone in evergreen cemetery for john troxel senior and it says he's the first settler of gettysburg um he was born in bethlehem pennsylvania in 1761 i think it says and he died in gettysburg in 1855 and he was 95 94. when he died it says he left 10 children is it uh 7 51 grandchildren 71 i'm sorry 71 grandchildren 120 great-grandchildren and 20 great great grandchildren to mourn his departure so not only was he the first hitter of gettysburg he took it upon himself to populate the town so it was a huge responsibility it's a big troxel family and mayor troxell right is a direct descendant i believe the former mayor trump trump uh was mayor of gettysburg for many years yes and we also have uh pension records from revolutionary war soldiers uh we have a collection of documents that came to us from the courthouse from early an or early lawyer that was handling cases for american revolutionary war soldiers and their widows and here's a guy named joshua craig that was one of the pensioners and it mentions that he was at um what is it what's the different battles listed here um he was at the battle of bunker hill probably you know we mentioned a lot of local adams county or units were in that york county units were in that battle um the storm in quebec where he's taken prisoner he said battle long island in the battle of new york uh that again taken prisoner um he was at brandywine he was a german town and he was at the taking of cornwallis of course at your town which pretty much ended the war so we don't have complete lists of all the men from our area that served in the american revolution but you might notice that our cemeteries around the county are filled with revolutionary war veterans that have markers on their ground right and this is the original pension file for this yes and you can see it's 1820 we're excited a document like this will be wonderful in the display to help people understand the revolutionary period oh maybe i'll talk about this there's a local doctor samuel knox uh he went to uh pennsylvania uh not penn state by the university of pennsylvania in philadelphia and graduated in 1790 i believe and this is his original diploma he's one of the earliest doctors in adams county and the diploma has some really faint signatures but when we pulled this out of a drawer a few years ago we noticed that one of the signatures that you can't quite make out down in the bottom left corner is dr benjamin rush who was a trustee of the college at that time and of course is one of the more famous founding fathers and a signer of the declaration of independence so we were thrilled to find that on this original diploma it's printed on some sort of a animal hide i think it's a really incredible piece but we do have the ledger book as well for dr samuel next coming up and actually one of his direct descendants dave seitz is a a lawyer here not a lawyer a real real estate agent here in gettysburg it's amazing how many of these families have direct descendants who are living in gettysburg today here's a page out of the medical journal that's amazing and of course we have some items here these are some of my favorite pieces in our collection related to the revolution kind of loosely i think all these three are related specifically to lafayette um and we have uh an original ribbon from lafayette's visit to the united states do you remember the year june 24 somewhere something like that i'm sure someone watching will know but we have this original ribbon that was kind of handed out as during the celebration of lafayette's visit the nation's guest and then i think one of the most exciting discoveries we've made at least i thought so in the last few years i remember tim called me immediately and said i had to come in and look at this we have a original booklet this uh maybe you know 60 70 page booklet published in the 1830s in washington it's a to celebrate the life and the character of lafayette and it was written basically at the request of congress and it was written by a congressman john quincy adams who was actually a former president who went back and served in congress which is a very i think the only time that's ever happened but the booklet is actually signed by john quincy adams in the top right corner and we verified the signature looked at other examples of his signature it was given to a local doctor and it's just an amazing piece we were so excited when we found it and it was in what was it in a file called lafayette right yeah it's a moses mclean's copy who was also a united states congressman in the 1840s right we had a file just called we wondered why do we have this file called lafayette it was the only thing in the file so we opened it up you never know what you're going to find here at the historical society of course you know the last thing i think we wanted to to highlight here is the uh the fact that there was slavery in adams county during this period a lot of people don't consider pennsylvania to be a slave state or a state where slavery existed but it did um and uh in 1780 pennsylvania passed i think was one of the first states if not the first to pass some sort of an abolition act so in 1780 uh the state of pennsylvania passed the gradual abolition of slavery which basically meant that anyone who was born after that point uh to to free parents would be able to to remain free um and slaves um who were um were slaves at that point would have to remain slaves for the rest of their lives uh but what's really interesting is that those who were born to slave mothers after that date would serve until age 28 as slaves they were actually technically pennsylvania this is really interesting i was reading about this earlier pennsylvania changed their designation from slave to indentured servant legally of course you know that semantics i think but they were uh you know forced to remain in slavery until the age of 28 and then at that point were freed and we see all these in really uh you know amazing articles in the newspaper that reference this and here is a an ad in the newspaper or i guess a notice about a runaway slave uh charles buck in adams county do we know i don't know i think tyrone township for this particular ad but the newspapers are filled with these so it's heidlersburg maybe heidler's perkins so she's just talking about it yeah but this is a a slave named charles buck the boy was bound to me for the term of years and is about 14 years of age so it's interesting when they talk about slaves they talk about owning the time not the person which is just really you know i think it's a way for them to perhaps feel better about the fact that they were maintaining the system of slavery in pennsylvania and then you know slavery was actually abolished in 1847 anyone who was still alive who was a slave was set free but we know of a couple instances where that wasn't the case i think we'll get to that in a minute did you want to add anything on this i just say if you look the unexpired time of a negro boy who has about seven years to serve so wow theoretically you know he's 21 right and that's john b mcpherson who i believe we have a portrait of him upstairs yeah so this is really just an amazing early piece of history not to be uh forgotten that you know that there were about i think we we know of a couple hundred uh enslaved individuals in the county and they um you know of course helped build a lot of the houses in the town and worked on many of the local farms yeah we'll go to the next one uh for sale the time of an active healthy negro boy who is now about 17 years of age and has to serve until 28 wow so again you know these make it very clear what they're selling you the time left on a person that is born to a slave mother wow yeah we hear another one again it says six years to serve has a child of about two years and this is a kind of a horrible note in this article they will be sold together or separate so you can see i mean there's just uh and i blocked out the name to uh i think you know had family well i can't remember um whoever that they said 1810 this is the gettysburg newspaper yeah right oh yeah um and uh this is another really amazing thing that we found just recently uh i believe this is from the uh estate documents of james gettis and who died in 1815 right and so this is these estate papers we have thousands of estate files here and this is uh at the end of the estate it lists all of the the property of the gettys family and then it says the time of a mulatto or mulatta girl named sydney and we do know that this is sydney bryan or sydney o'brien who was the slave of the gettys family and lived in gettysburg as a free person for many many years after the get is passed away and actually own property on south washington street in town i mean we have this right here to as evidence of that this is s o brian or sydney o'brien who uh owned this property which is now right in the middle of breckenridge street the uh basically this was an alley at the time but was expanded um into what is now breckenridge street and so the house sits kind of in the middle of the road today if you were to turn at that intersection right next to the ame church on the corner but sydney brian we have some amazing documents from her family we have her will which is amazing and we have um some a family bible from the family as well mean i think is this the one this is the the bible owned by uh sydney's daughter getty ann stanton sydney married a stanton and so getty ann i'm sorry getty ann probably married to stanton um and we have the uh the original family bible given to us by a descendant of the stanton family uh it's an amazing amazing piece and there's a lot of discussion as to whether there is a familial tie between the stanton's and the gettys family through perhaps one of james's sons and you know be interesting to test that one day and check some dna on both sides and see if that is is actually the case um of course it wouldn't be uncommon to to have that uh where you know there's a a mulatto child um of people didn't pick it up the the time that was left on her which is according to the account was like 20 years time left on sydney it was worth 200 in the estate it was listed as being guided that's amazing yeah and then uh tim and i wanted to end on this this is just a really amazing um obituary uh for a slave now this is really interesting so uh patience hack or patient sib uh died in i think is it 1858 or at 57 maybe 58 58 yeah and uh at that time you know on the 1850 census she was listed as a slave and it says in her obituary she was perhaps the only slave then alive in adams county or perhaps in the state now it's interesting because pennsylvania did abolish slavery in 1847 but i guess in violation of that act this family you know kept patients as a slave until her death in 1858 she's actually listed on the 1850 census again three years after slavery's abolished officially in pennsylvania but she's listed on that census as a slave so this is just a really amazing obituary it says she was a survivor of the family of slaves belonging to the estate of leonard hatter um and uh i believe she it wasn't interesting she was kindly taken care of and supported by thomas stevens esquire and lady up until the time of her death and she she lived in i think upper atoms right do we i don't know if we know the township but uh lived in oh there it does say petersburg york springs right there um so and an amazing article that that kind of sums up um the uh the story here in this period of time so uh of course you've seen all kinds of really amazing artifacts any final words on that on that tim well i i you know when we're going through these artifacts and we're trying to uh imagine how the museum could lay be laid out i think we what we've been doing is taking the topics seeing what artifacts we have to associate with the topics and the stories we'd like to tell and then we're thinking about how how to present them of course we have a fabulous museum designer that's going to make us look really good that is true yeah and we do appreciate the support this is a you know the adams county historical society's been around since 1888 and we've amassed this incredible collection but it's really in jeopardy right now with the the current building we're in as you can see it's an old victorian house without any fire protection no climate control for these amazing artifacts and we think the story of gettysburg and of the county is really amazing and one of the best local histories in the country so we're gonna put a lot of these artifacts on display and put wonderful stories and and images in this museum and we've got a fantastic museum designer so i hope you'll you'll consider supporting the project no matter if you live here or you live somewhere across the country we have i think a hundred and eighty dollars left to get our full match tonight so uh if you're willing to hit the donate button and support us everything helps um and then finally just uh one last note about our project this is the the main building we're gonna start later this year uh but we're going to be actually beginning the first structure which is a smaller storage building located behind the main building probably within a matter of weeks and when we have that complete probably over the summer at some point we're going to move 22 giant crates full of artifacts into this new storage building and these are items that we've had in storage for as tim said about a decade and there are all kinds of amazing items from dinosaur footprints to native american projectiles to clothing and and furniture that belong to some of these families and you know grandfather clocks and and we have ballot boxes from the local precincts one that eisenhower used it is just an amazing collection and tim and i know for a fact that when we open those boxes and those crates we're going to start finding things that we've never seen before because with a collection this big you can make discoveries very easily so i think tim the other day figured out we have eight uniforms from world war one soldiers in our collection and one of the several of them were wounded so you know we'll see if these uniforms have damage from you know from injuries you know during the war we have no idea what we're going to find there's gas masks in there you know it'll be exciting to to dig through those materials and get them into a proper home where we don't have to worry about things like fire and flooding and and preserving things in the right climate so thanks for watching tonight i hope you'll you'll support the project check out our website uh we have a lot more about this we're also you know there's a lot of naming opportunities if you're you're able to commit more to this project we'd we'd love to to talk to you about that and you can have your name associated with the building on um in all kinds of different spaces that we're designing so anyway thanks again for being with us we're going to keep keep doing these weekly programs that we know have been very popular during the pandemic we're both vaccinated now so we'll be um you know it'll be easier to hear us without our masks on and uh we're excited to eventually get back to some in-person programs as well so thanks for your time tonight and thank you for supporting the adams county historical society

Channel: Adams County Historical Society at Gettysburg

Views: 2,633

Rating: 4.891892 out of 5

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Id: ePwRgHLUEDo

Length: 67min 5sec (4025 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021