Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: January 1986 Volume 24 Number 1, Page 2

Foreword

Page 2

In 1986 the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club will mark its 50th anniversary. In recognition of this milestone, our first article in this issue is a brief history of the Club and its beginnings in the fall of 1936. Even after half a century, there is a great deal of local history still to be recorded and preserved!

The account of the military service of Sgt. Harry Burns during the Civil War is another previously unpublished manuscript by Frank Burns, one of the charter members of the Club. Before his death in 1946, Frank was also one of the Club's most active members, serving as president in 1941 and 1942, and contributing more than two dozen articles to the Quarterly.

It is interesting to speculate about what might have happened to our area if the plan of Henry Woolman to move the undergraduate departments of the University of Pennsylvania to Tredyffrin township had materialized. The Valley Forge Project of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1930s is the subject of the next article in this issue.

And lastly is an appreciation of the Reverend Alden W. Quimby - not as the pastor of the Berwyn Methodist Church, but as an amateur astronomer who made nearly 11,000 observations of the Sun over a period of more than three decades. (His sermons were sometimes criticized as being "too astronomical".) The appreciation was written by Elizabeth Rumrill's father, a fellow amateur astronomer and close friend.