Historic Resources Committee
The Historic Resources Committee is a group of Township residents who have collected a wealth of historic information about West Vincent and/or would like to help in gathering and researching our township’s history.
The group meets monthly on the first Tuesday of each month at 7:00 p.m. in the Township Building Meeting room. The public is invited to attend.
Do you love History? Want to help go through documentation? Do you have a program you would like to go through?
Evans Farm
Our Neighbor's Family History is Our Home - written by Yvonne Brownlee (nee Evans)
My grandparents (I. Newton Evans Sr. and Mae Littlefield Evans) and my parents (I. Newton Evans Jr. and Evelyn Pannebaker Evans) purchased a 132-acre farm in 1946. My parents were then married on April 20, 1946 at St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church.
Before purchasing this farm to support both families, my grandparents and father had lived on another farm (previously owned by Charles and Ruth Pennypacker) on Route 401 just north of Fellowship Road, in Uwchland Township, which now has a wood cabin front.
Their first dwelling on the farm was a converted spring house, affectionately named by my mother as “the bungalow”. The “bungalow” sat directly across St. Matthew’s Road from the farm house and was removed when Matthew’s Meadows was developed. As our family grew to be three children (1956), we moved into the farm house and my grandparents rehabbed the house that is now known as The Gottier, at the corner of Malehorn Road and St. Matthew’s Road.
The date on the stone portion of the farm house is 1832; and, I suspect that the stone portion of the barn would have been built at the same time. I remember my mother showing me a place at the bottom of our cellar steps where a piece of plaster had fallen off the wall and a log was visible. We suspect that there was a log house and probably a log barn on the site before the stone one was built.
Our farm had been cited in the book, “History of Chester County, With Genealogical and Biographical Sketches”, co-authored by Gilbert Cope and J. Smith Futhey, 1881. The owners at that time were the Woodwards . We cherish our family copy of the book each time we visit my brother in Maryland.
Frederick Sheeder
FREDERICK SHEEDER, the author of this history of Vincent Township, Chester Co., Pa., was born Feb. 20, 1777, in Nassau, Saarbrucken, Germany.
He came to Pennsylvania with his father when sixteen years of age, and afterwards learned the trade of a tailor.
During the war of 1812 he enlisted as a private and for a time was in camp at Marcus Hook. He became prosperous and built in the neighborhood where he lived over twenty-four houses. – Read a copy of the full article and his account of West Vincent history, published by The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (PMHB), a quarterly scholarly journal and one of the country’s most prestigious state historical publications. Published since 1877 by The Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
- 1765 – Chester County
- 1773 – West Vincent Survey, by Robert Dill
- 1785 – Chester County
- 1790 – West Vincent, by Cremers
- 1822 – Hindman, Chester County
- 1847 – Chester County
- 1856 – Chester County
- 1860 – Chester County
- 1873 – Township Map
- 1874 – Atlas Witmer
- 1883 – Atlast – Breou’s West Vincent
- 1934 – Property Atlas
- WV Opalanie Park – History of the Lenape
- Birchrunville Building Inventory
- A Background History of Bryn Coed Farms
- A Historical Narrative of Powder Mill Farm
- A History of West Vincent Township – Elisabeth Eldridge, 1977
- Bryn Coed, “Wooded Hill”, West Vincent’s Historic Treasure
- Pictorial Tribute to Historic Farmsteads of West Vincent
- The Life and Times of Owen J. Roberts, 1875-1955
- Stauffer Family Farm – B. Quinter
- Elijah Speaks: Lineage of Charlotte Whiteside Beck by James S. Beck (discussing families: Thomas, Evans, Davis, John, Benner, and Whitesides)
History of Frederick Sheeder
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
6:30 p.m., Township Building