Delaware County has a historical society, with offices, research library and history museum in an old bank building in Chester. For a variety of reasons, they are moving to a newer and smaller space in Media. There is not enough room in the new space for all that they have acquired over
the years, and so a few months ago they put out the call to local history organizations to see if they might be interested in acquiring items not core to their mission as a county-wide historical society. Some of those items caught our attention.
A local weekly newspaper, the County Press, and its predecessor the County Leader, have been publishing news about Marple and Newtown going back to the early 1930’s. Though many issues have been lost over the years, paper copies still exist … in the basement of the Delaware County Historical Society. In the area of historic preservation, you try to save what you can when you can, and so we looked at this as a good opportunity.
Marple Historical Society President Sam Pickard and I reached out to the county society and volunteered to take whatever issues remain of the newspaper archives. The volumes were stored in one room of the labyrinth basement beneath the bank building, in boxes and in old metal file
cabinets. We searched around for an appropriate place in Marple to store them until we could go through them and see what was there. And came up empty. The Massey House only had available room in the attic – a long climb up narrow windy 18th century stairways. But as time wound down to the deadline, we had to act or perhaps lose the newspapers.
In May, we recruited board member Bruce Powell, rented a truck, and over two days we moved the entire collection from that dingy basement, up to the street, into the truck, back to the Massey House, and … yes … box by heavy box up into the attic. Temporarily.
We need permanent and climate-controlled space, to review these items, but also to keep and perhaps display other artifacts of township history. We have some ideas for possible storage space, but if you have any as well, please let us know. And then we can get to the fun part – reviewing and cataloging what we’ve acquired and figuring out how to make them available to our members.
For more on the history of Marple, visit the Marple Historical Society website and Facebook page, and join the Society to keep up to date on coming events: www.MarpleHistoricalSociety.org