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National Park Service awards grant to do an Historic Sites Survey The Phillipsburg Area Historical Society has been awarded a $7,500 grant by the National Park Service to conduct an historic sites survey of the town of Phillipsburg. The survey won the award in competition with a dozen other projects in the Upper delaware River watershed region. The survey will be conducted by Society members and other volunteers. It will include a block-by-block survey of structures erected before 1900, as well as those potentially of architectural or historic significance that were built after 1900. It will also include vistas or scenic viewpoints, particularly of the Forks of the Delaware, that merit recognition. The results of the survey will be available as an online database, probably much like Wikipedia, and available through this website. The Society also expects to publish a book and/or booklet highlighting the more interesting and significant sites in the town and the immediate vicinity. The website and some of the printed materials will be available free to the general public. The survey will be conducted entirely by volunteers, working under the direction of Dr. Frank L. Greenagel. People interested in working on a survey team should contact Dr. Greenagel (e-mail: flg@guidedlearning.com). There will be several training sessions on survey methods, how to recognize the tell-tale architectural elements of nineteenth-century structures, and data integrity before the survey teams actually take to the streets in July. The expectation is that an historic sites survey will call attention to a number of historically- or architecturally-significant buildings in the town—sites worth preserving or documenting. The Historical Society hopes that some signage or plaques might be prepared for the most significant of the structures as a means of emphasizing the town’s rich history.
You can expect us to focus quite a bit on the architecture of the area—it abounds in old stone barns, Victorian residences, one-room schoolhouses, eighteenth-century churches, stone lime kilns, and delightful steel bridges. We've got some fascinating cemeteries, a few cannons, a couple of red-brick factories more than a century old, the Morris Canal, and even a brownstone townhouse that might have come straight from the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. There are more than a handful of places listed on the National Register of Historic Places in this part of the county, and a least one village that is now applying for that designation. Architecture is not our only concern, of course. There is much history in the railroads, events, genealogies, and even a few tall tales. Some controversies, too—for instance, about how Phillipsburg got its name. We're going to highlight local events—not just those with an historical accent, but things that may be of interest to people whose attention is not solely centered on high school football. Eighteenth-century maps, diaries, newspaper clippings, early music, old postcards and vintage photographs all fall within our purview. So if you live in Alpha, Greenwich, Lopatcong, Pohatcong—even Easton—or are living elsewhere now but have a connection to this area, please take a few minutes to look around and see what's here, then bookmark this site so you can come back. We plan on updating it frequently. We are also looking for a few people who can contribute occasionally (or regularly) to this website. We're interested in anything related to the history of the area—an old postcard perhaps, or something about one of your ancestors who lived here. Reminiscenses and anecdotes are fine—it doesn't have to be the product of scholarly research (although we will make serious monographs available at the publications link). One of the major efforts of the Society is to preserve, research and document the Roseberry house, which was built sometime between 1750 and 1770, we believe. Pamela Backes, Barbara Bond, Gil Greene and Wayne Sherrer have been working on the genealogy of the many Roseberrys for a number of weeks already, and they will be reporting on that eventually. I've already read some fascinating material on a couple of Roseberrys. We're going to work on other families of early settlers, too. We hope to make this site, and the Roseberry Homestead blog a rich source of authoritative information about the early settlement of the area. If you'd like to help out—some of it is library research, much is networking with others who've already done some of the work, and much can be done via the internet—we welcome your participation.
Another
objective is to provide some kind of map or guide to the historic
sites of the area. [Note: there is one such guide but it lists fewer
than a dozen sites. See the Publications page.] Maybe there will be several
such guides—directions
for a driving tour of Finesville and Siegelville, or a walking tour of
Stewartsville, for example. Visitors should be able to download such
a guide from this
website, and maybe even the Chamber of Commerce will distribute it. Again,
willing workers will be needed to develop the materials for such a guide.
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If you
are from this region you may recognize a few of the buildings
above—they
include places in Carpentersville, Stewartsville, Finesville and Riegelsville
as well as Phillipsburg. Our intention is to cover the history of the Phillipsburg area,
not just the town itself. Broadly speaking, that means the western part
of Warren County, and we'll often ignore municipal boundaries to call attention
to something of note.
One
thing we know for sure is that John Roseberry did not build the house
that bears his name. What we are not certain about is who
was the client for whom it was built. Obviously a refined person of some
taste and judgment, as well as a lot of money. We have a couple of strong
candidates, but no conclusive evidence yet. This fragment of a wall painting
from the parlor may provide a clue. We will have the pigment analyzed
and we'll consult with experts who may be able to tell us when that style
of floral motif was fashionable—perhaps even the name of the painter!
Frankly, part of the fun is trying to solve a multi-dimensional jigsaw
puzzle.
Again, we welcome your participation.
In a
month or two we'll sponsor a meeting at which we lay out the evidence
we have, the unknowns, doubts and question marks, as well as the direction
of our current research efforts. That kind of colloquium can be very
stimulating
and often productive. We'll let everyone know on this website as soon as
we set a date.