Calendar
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PAHS Business Meeting
7 PM FEB. 19, 2012

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PAHS Business Meeting 7 PM

New Officer's for 2012-2013

President Pam Backes

VP Sue Brooks

Secretary Open

Corresponding Secretary Richard Backes

Treasurer Steve Zarbatany

Nov, 2011

The Warren County Municipal and Charitable Conservancy Trust Committee has awarded the PAHS $304,000.00 for continuing work on the Roseberry House..

The New, Official Phillipsburg, NJ 150th Town Celebration Book
Available May 21, 2011

The new - official Phillipsburg, New Jersey 150th Town Celebration Book is available for purchase at the Phillipsburg Free Public Library on 200 Frost Avenue and at the town hall on 675 Corliss Avenue in Phillipsburg, New Jersey at a price of $21.00 a copy. The 8-1/2" x 11" full color book contains over 150 pages depicting life in Phillipsburg from the past and present.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Several people have suggested that in addition to the school tours that we make a package of materials available to the area schools for use in the courses on New Jersey history. Teachers and curriculum specials will have to take the lead in that, and they'll have the final say about what works and is appropriate, but it is likely to be those of us exceptionally interested in local history that will dig out and assemble the materials from which those lesson plans will be drawn.