Pennsylvania

Referred to in contemporary accounts as the “handsomest” residence in Chambersburg, the Orr-Sharpe Residence is located on Philadelphia Avenue, a broad thoroughfare with deep lawns and houses of the town’s nineteenth-century elite, that connects downtown with Wilson College. It was built for D.A. (David Alonzo) Orr, who, with a brother, purchased the Chambersburg Valley Spirit newspaper in 1879.

Waters Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church, formerly known as Shiloh Baptist then Mount Olive AME, is associated with the pre-Civil War history of Black churches, and specifically when the AME Church funded a number of building projects in the United States and abroad for missionary work. The retention of the original building fabric demonstrates the economic viability of the AME Church before the 1860s, when the church sought to expand its holdings in its first district, which included Philadelphia.

This churchyard is the only physical remnant of the Mount Calvary African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. It is articulated in its appearance, with boundaries that clearly demarcate its area adjacent to lot on which the church once stood. The church building, erected in 1852, was one of the oldest churches in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Mount Calvary was an example of the pre–Civil War geographical movement of the AME Church and its efforts in expanding church influence through the acquisition of property and its active, mobile membership and leadership.

This homestead is significant for its historical association with the Montiers, a Black family with ancestral ties to Humphrey Morrey, the first mayor of Philadelphia. The Montiers are also known for their descendants’ pendant portraits that currently hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Painted by Franklin R. Street in 1841, these portraits depict a family of great wealth, which was not typical of most nineteenth-century Black Americans. The Montier family house was built in 1772 in the Black community of Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Master carpenter Edmund Woolley was paid five English pounds for making the drawings of the Pennsylvania State House, though he consulted with Andrew Hamilton, a lawyer and Speaker of the State Assembly. Both men used English architectural publications from which the massing and detail are derived. The larger scale windows of the upper facade with marble panels below along the Chestnut Street facade reflect in a provincial manner the English Renaissance of Inigo Jones.

In 2004, two buildings adjacent to Erie's Federal Building of 1938 were connected to it by a glass lobby atrium and spaces added for offices and courtrooms. This skillful adaptation highlights the best of each historic building and allows for smooth functionality.

The forty-two acres of Herr's Island, two miles upstream from the Golden Triangle, entered history in 1753 when George Washington nearly drowned near here. A century later, Benjamin Herr made a fitful start at developing the island into a village of tree-lined streets, homes, shops, and recreational areas. But Herr's village was taken over by industry in the 1850s, and given its first stockyards by tanner James Callery in 1885.

The Buhl Foundation, in its brochure for the project, promoted this for-profit housing as the “First large scale, planned, residential community built from the ground up in one operation to be retained in single ownership and managed as a long-term investment.” Chatham Village always had a national, and even international, impact out of proportion to its rather modest dimensions, deriving in part from the names of Stein and Wright, acclaimed planners of Sunnyside Gardens in Queens, New York, and Radburn, New Jersey.

This many-sectioned farmhouse, typical of Chester County, Pennsylvania, was enhanced by a Philadelphia architect for twentieth-century owner John Reese. The name means “boundary stone,” referring to a nearby marker on the circular border between Pennsylvania and Delaware. In the eighteenth century the Evans family owned the house and operated a mill nearby. Okie had designed the S. Hallock du Pont House, Squirrel Run, at 5 Old Barley Mill Road, near Hagley (1927), as well as a home for Henry Belin du Pont near Mt. Cuba (1935;

The south side of the square was given superb architectural definition with this fine late former hotel block by favorite son John Dempwolf. He animated the building with a picturesque skyline of mansarded gables and towers (lost in a 1947 fire) and with projecting bays that still engage the eye. It complements the adjacent Rupp Building with its lighter yellow brick, constructed the following year, presumably by the same architect. The Rupp Building fortunately retains its upper towers and dormers, forming a transition to the towers of Trinity United Church of Christ (