A statewide search for historic buildings finds 1000s after a decades-long drought

An army of contractors has spent the past several years quietly fanning out across Pennsylvania to find the history state records have missed.

The deployment, the first of its kind here since the 1980s, quickly produced leads.

In year one, 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 multiyear, 55-county architectural survey ended this June, more than 20,000 properties had been logged, along with 727 potential archaeological sites.

The findings include Black churches and Croatian clubs in coal country; Chinese laundries; vintage ice cream stands; a stone altar on a Snyder County mountain; Northern Tier drive-ins; American Legion outposts galore; pyramids in Bucks County; the Liberty Theater in Nanty Glo, Cambria County; and mid-20th century homes in Upper Chichester, Delaware County.

If you browse the series of blog posts detailing the discoveries, you might find yourself thinking, “A lot of these historic places don’t look very old.” The stone altar in Snyder County was only built in 1974, for instance.

But that falls right around the 50-year threshold for what experts will generally consider historic, explains Andrea MacDonald, director of the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). “So that's bringing us up to 1974,” MacDonald told PA Local.

In short, history is relative, and state officials wanted a proper accounting of these newly “old” places sooner rather than later.

Properties identified through this “baseline survey” won’t all be deemed worthy of a National Register of Historic Places listing, a federal distinction. Most won’t, probably. But the data gleaned from the hunt can inform future land surveys and open up preservation tax credits and grants for rehab projects whether a site lands the national honor or not.

Overshooting is part of the process, MacDonald said. “We don't know what we’re promoting the preservation of until we know what those places are.”

Finding that history involves a lot of shoe-leather work.

SHPO spent $700,000 to send nine consulting firms and dozens of surveyors out into the field. At the top of its detailed list of priorities were Black churches and cemeteries, and “underrepresented communities.”

Of the 20,000 resources logged in total by the project, 2,000 were “historically associated with African American or other ethnic communities,” MacDonald told PA Local by email. That’s significant at a time when physical emblems 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 the commonwealth’s inventorying began soon after, MacDonald said for many states the earliest listings centered on the usual suspects — courthouses, battlefields, and architectural standouts.

In Pennsylvania, digging for the less-obvious gems of historical significance, the deeper cuts, would slow considerably — and stay that way for decades — as SHPO focused its resources elsewhere.

“We're a federal-state partnership and we had a number of other programs we started to be responsible for, programs administered on behalf of the National Park Service, for example,” MacDonald said. “We are a very small but mighty staff, 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 a relatively high level of preservation activity already — Philadelphia, Allegheny, Lancaster, and Chester, to name a few — were excluded.

“We really wanted to focus on places we knew nothing or very little about,” MacDonald said. “We identified specific municipalities in each county [of focus] where it looked like no real inventory effort had ever taken place, so that’s where we started.”

Thousands of new resources were added to the Historic Places Inventory annually 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 consumption in the coming months, via PA-SHARE.

Hundreds of historic sites have been recommended for further study. This partly involves evaluating them for potential National Register listings. 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. There is still a lot of work left to do.

“Because we can't do it all, obviously we will rely on our local partners — perhaps county and local historical societies, planning commissions, you know, other organizations who may have an interest in advancing some of these recommendations and doing additional research,” MacDonald said. “That will be our call to action to help advance this work.”

WESA partners with Spotlight PA, a collaborative, reader-funded newsroom producing accountability journalism for all of Pennsylvania. More at spotlightpa.org.