1900s: March 2009 Archives

Illustration from York Wood Choppers charter, 1898.

I was recently asked about an 1899 York Press reference to Foresters and Wood Choppers. Sound like people connected to lumbering, right? Not when you consider the popularity of fraternal organizations in that era. Men really seemed to like to get out to the lodge hall once a week. The local city directories abound with Knights, Odd Fellows, Red Men, Eagles, Heptasophs, and, yes, Foresters and Wood Choppers.

Fairview/Thompson's Students and Teacher, c. 1905.

The photo above shows students and teacher at Thompson's School in Chanceford Township about 1905. The slate held by the boy in the middle of the front row, however, says "Fairview School, J. W. Buckingham, Teacher.

One-room schools sometimes went by two names. Often one was descriptive, such as Fairview or Clearview, and the other referred to a nearby family and/or former owner of the school property. I compared this photo with one taken a few years later that had Thompson's School on the slate. There were quite a few of the same children identified on both photos. They were just a bit older on the second one.

Many children received their primary education at Thompson's school until it closed in the 1950s when Chanceford Township consolidated their schools, now in the Red Lion Area School District. A first-ever reunion banquet is being planned for Saturday April 18, 2009. Reservations are due April 1, so if you are interested call Nancy Paley Hetrick at 717-244-4401 before April 1. The committee is also seeking photos and other memorabilia.

The students on the 1905 photo are tentatively identified below. If you have any corrections or additions, please let me know. For example, the photo has 11 boys in the back row, but the list of students names 12. I thought I had solved that by including the boy that can be faintly seen on the left side of the school, but then some of the other boys that have been positively identified from other sources do not line up correctly.

York Furnace Bridge piers, probably in the 1890s.

Residents of "the lower end" of York and Lancaster counties thought they could beat winter weather in the 1850s by building a bridge across the Susquehanna River at York Furnace.

The Lancaster Examiner of November 20, 1855 celebrated the opening of the bridge. The paper said that the York County people of Fawn, Lower Chanceford, and Peach Bottom would no longer be cut off from commerce in the winter, when the Susquehanna and Tidewater canal was closed and roads were bad to York. Now they could easily get to Lancaster to do their buying and selling.

The York Furnace bridge was to be an integral part of a state road system stretching across four counties from Gettysburg to Chester County.

That very weather they were trying to bypass was the final nemisis of the bridge. The wooden bridge across a narrow part of the Susquehanna was no match for first, wind, and then ice, that came roaring down the river.

See my recent York Sunday News column below for the story of the ill-fated bridge at York Furnace.

This photo may show the ice that carried away the remaining bridge piers in the early 1900s. The red circle marks men standing on the ice, giving you an idea of the size of the ice blocks.

The January 30, 1900 York Press relates a lively little lawsuit filed by the stone cutter when his customer refused to take delivery. The case unfolded in the York County Common Pleas Court as reported below: