Recently in Chanceford Twp. Category

Tomatoes and Shakespeare and York County?

I recently wrote my York Sunday News column on the canning houses of York County, going back to the 1920s through the 1950s when the canneries dotted the county. Local farmers could easily haul their fresh vegetables just down the road to be canned and distributed all over the country.

The fanciful labels were lithographed in tempting color, usually depicting lush produce, but sometimes making you wonder why other designs were chosen. You can see the diversity in the photos shown here.

The Wel-Don bean labels above have a great story behind them.

Lucky canning house, probably 1930s
My 96-year-old mother-in-law remembers picking string beans at farms in Chanceford Township when she was 10 or so in the 1920s. She says she picked beans during the day and then helped snip them at the Lucky canning house in the evening.

I purchased a Lucky canning house ledger covering September through November, 1943 at a yard sale a few years ago and donated it to the York County Heritage Trust Library/Archives. The ledger shows that they were canning corn and tomatoes then.
Wholesale customers for canned corn included Daugherty & Ward, Crisfield, Del.; Fulton, Mehring & Hauser, York; Oriental Paper & Bag Co.; District Wholesale Grocery Co. and Sprague, Warner, Kenny Co., all of Washington, D.C.; Maryland Gro. Co. Baltimore, Md. and Audment Bros., Lancaster, Pa. The U.S. Government purchased both 1,500 cases of corn and 3,750 cases of tomatoes, perhaps to feed World War II troops.

See below for my recent York Sunday News column on York County canners and vegetable pickers and also a photo of the Lucky cannery workers.

One of my recent posts was on the long tradition of Sunday School picnics in York County, brought up by my plans to help at my church picnic at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Chanceford Township, always held the first Thursday of August.

After a few hours of helping cut up pies and cakes, I took my usual position of manning (womanning?) the soup carry-out window. My daughter and I, armed with quart measures, doled out gallons and gallons of ham bean and chicken corn soup for the next eight hours with hardly a break.

We had many friendly conversations with the happy purchasers as we dished out the soup, but one sticks out.

Reno and Craley children at St. Luke picnic, c.1920.

When I was a child, just about every country church had a picnic grove in which they held the annual Sunday School Picnic. Many churches carry on the tradition. In fact, the church picnic often provides needed funds to help keep many small congregations solvent.

Every first Thursday in August, my church, St. Luke Lutheran Church at New Bridgeville (Chanceford Township), still dishes chicken-corn and ham-bean soups out of the big kettles to accompany various hot sandwiches and home-baked pies and cakes. Besides feeding hundreds of people in the air-conditioned social hall, we do a very brisk business in soup carry-out, selling soup by the quart. (That's usually my job.)

After they eat, people can pull their lawn chairs out of their cars, sit down and listen to live music. Community bands still provide the tunes at some picnics, but St. Luke has lately opted for smaller bands. This year Just Plain Country will be followed by the Harold Tipton Band. Ice cream, soda, and sandwiches are sold at outdoor stands in case hunger strikes again. Many attendees, who come from all over the county, stroll around the well-kept cemetery. Since St. Luke was organized in 1772, there is a good chance that they can find some relatives there.

1864 Bridgen's map of Conestoga Township showing dam.

1860 Shearer & Lake map of Chanceford Township.

A friend recently alerted me to an article about the port of Safe Harbor on the east bank of the Susquehanna River. The article referred to the Conestoga Navigation, which operated from the late 1820s to around 1850. It was an 18-mile-long slack water navigation utilizing the Conestoga Creek with a system of nine locks. It ended at Safe Harbor on the Susquehanna River. Where did the cargo go from there?

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.

Thomas Cooney didn't let any modesty get in his way in his ad for his Chanceford Township public house in the October 30, 1855 York Gazette:

As you can see below, he even went to uncommon lengths by including the endorsements of many of the leading citizens of York as well as those who lived in his neighborhood.

It was April 1777. The Revolutionary War was not going well. Desertion was rampant. General Washington had said as much in a letter he wrote to his brother John on February 24.
Click here to read that letter at the Library of Congress web site.

Deserters were described in detail in the newspapers, along with a call for apprehension and an offered reward. Descriptions of the fugitive soldiers were often detailed, as shown in the following advertisement from the Pennsylvania Gazette for William Murphy of Chanceford Township.

In a previous post I pointed out that traffic accidents made the news long before automobiles were invented.

Click here to read about some pre-auto mishaps.

The advent of the motor car caused just added to the mix, as shown by the March 1908 Gazette account below:

I guess it is human nature to want to have the biggest and the best. We are always impressed by the tallest buildings and the most gigantic pumpkins.

Our forebears were no different, as we can see by the Lewis Miller drawing above of a huge pumpkin. Miller captioned it: “1809. Christian Leaman, big and large pumpkin grown in his garden. It was as large as a barrel and more in circumference around. Old Dr. John Fisher bought it and sent it to Baltimore to let them see what old York can raise and examine it. No man could lift it from the ground.”

The citizens often made sure the local newspapers knew about their accomplishments. Short items from all over the county in the York Gazette in the autumn of 1877 list several examples: