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An army of contractors has been quietly traveling across Pennsylvania in recent years, uncovering the history missing from the state archives.
The effort, the first of its kind since the 1980s, quickly produced new insights.
In its first year, more than 7,500 properties in 17 rural counties were added to Pennsylvania’s Historic Places Inventory, which is exactly what it sounds like. By the time the multi-year, 55-county architectural survey ended last June, more than 20,000 properties had been recorded, along with 727 potential archaeological sites.
The finds include black churches and Croatian clubs in coalfields; Chinese laundries; vintage ice cream stands; a stone altar on a mountain in Snyder County; drive-ins in the Northern Tier; numerous American Legion outposts; pyramids in Bucks County; the Liberty Theater in Nanty Glo, Cambria County; and mid-20th-century homes in Upper Chichester, Delaware County.
As you read through the series of blog posts describing the discoveries, you might think, “A lot of these historic sites don’t look that old.” The stone altar in Snyder County, for example, wasn’t built until 1974.
But that falls just short of the 50-year mark for what experts generally consider historic, explained Andrea MacDonald, director of the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). “So that brings us to 1974,” MacDonald told PA Local.
In short, history is relative and state officials wanted a proper accounting of these new ‘old’ places as soon as possible.
The properties identified through this “baseline survey” aren’t all deemed worthy of listing on the National Register of Historic Places, a federal designation. Most probably aren’t. But the data gleaned from the hunt could inform future surveys and provide tax credits and preservation grants for renovation projects, whether or not a location earns the national honor.
Overshooting is part of the process, MacDonald said. “We don’t know what we’re advocating for conservation until we know what those places are.”
Discovering that history involves a lot of shoe leather work.
SHPO spent $700,000 to send nine consulting firms and dozens of surveyors into the field. At the top of the detailed list of priorities were black churches and cemeteries, and “underrepresented communities.”
Of the 20,000 total wells recorded by the project, 2,000 were “historically associated with African-American or other ethnic communities,” MacDonald told PA Local via email. That’s significant at a time when physical symbols of black history are disappearing in Pennsylvania and nationwide. MacDonald added in a follow-up phone call that sites associated with the Underground Railroad were particularly prized by surveyors.
Every state has a Historic Preservation Office, as authorized under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Pennsylvania’s didn’t get off the ground until the 1970s. And while commonwealth inventories began soon after, MacDonald said that for many states, the first listings focused on the usual suspects: courthouses, battlefields and architectural highlights.
In Pennsylvania, digging for the less obvious gems of historical significance, the deeper cuts, would be significantly delayed — and would continue for decades — as SHPO redeploys its resources elsewhere.
“We’re a federal-state partnership, and we had a number of other programs that we were responsible for, programs that were administered on behalf of the National Park Service, for example,” MacDonald said. “We’re a very small but mighty team, but we didn’t have the resources to do a lot of proactive work.” That changed with this baseline survey, which coincided with the launch of PA-SHARE, or Pennsylvania’s State Historic and Archaeological Resource Exchange.
Counties with relatively high levels of conservation activity—Philadelphia, Allegheny, Lancaster and Chester, to name a few—were excluded.
“We really wanted to focus on places that we knew nothing or very little about,” MacDonald said. “We identified specific communities in each county [of focus] where it seemed like no real inventory had ever taken place, so that’s where we started.”
Thousands of new resources were added to the Historic Places Inventory each year during the three-year effort. “Before that, it was a fraction of those numbers … for many, many years, it was nowhere near that volume,” MacDonald added. The agency plans to present all of the findings for public use in the coming months, via PA-SHARE.
Hundreds of historic sites have been recommended for further study. Part of that involves evaluating them for possible listing on the National Register. Officials will also consider consolidating clusters of resources in one area — groupings of AME churches, ethnic clubs, etc. — into historic districts that can be evaluated collectively. Much work remains to be done.
“Because we can’t do everything, we’re obviously going to rely on our local partners — perhaps county and local historical societies, planning commissions, you know, other organizations that have an interest in advancing some of these recommendations and doing additional research,” MacDonald said. “That’s going to be our call to action to help move this work forward.”
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