When Robert M. Goshorn died in November of 1995, the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club was faced with the question of what to do with the Club archives which had been stored at the Goshorn home for over 25 years. In addition to material from early club years, Bob had kept files relating to work he had done, and intended to do. Other material had been given to him as keeper of the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club archives, and some had been acquired by him personally.

The Club was given most of the month of December to pack and remove its possessions from the Goshorn home. Fortunately, the Tredyffrin/Easttown School District agreed to transport and store them in a basement storeroom of the district's Education Services Center on First Avenue in Berwyn. In March of 1996, the boxed material was moved to a closet on the second floor of the build­ing, and to file cabinets donated to the club which were placed in the hall outside the room used for public meetings. Club members were allowed to use a small room adjoining the meeting room to sort, index and preserve the collection.

The materials making up the archives have been unboxed and sorted into ap­proximately twenty categories as follows:

General file
Newspaper clipping file
Robert M. Goshorn file
Files of early Club researchers Frank Burns, Howard Okie and Dr. Baugh

Club records
Back issues of the Quarterly
Pamphlets
Books

Antique books
Scrap books
Photographs and glass negatives
Ephemera

Drawings and art
Maps
Local newsletters: Berwyn Post, Eastfrin, etc.
Audio tapes, video tapes

Deeds
Artifacts

The clipping file has been separated into three separate sections: family file, geographical file and subject file. We are making an effort to follow in a simplified fashion the system used at the county historical society in West Chester.

The Family clipping file has been placed in alphabetical sequence by family surname. Both newspaper articles and photographs are filed here. Obituary notices are most important to our records. Many of them have been handed down from early Club days. Xerox copies from the clipping file at Chester County Historical Society also go here. Other supportive information, such as a geneal­ogy prepared by Clarence Staats, has been placed in this file. Copies of bio­graphical sketches taken from Wylie or Heathcote should find their way here. We encourage anyone with family history information to come in and help us estab­lish a file.

In the Geographical clipping file material is separated by locality: Tredyffrin, Easttown, Devon, Paoli, Berwyn, Valley Forge Park and such.

Categories in the Subject file are formed as they arise: schools, transportation, art and wars are some examples. Under schools we have newspaper articles on the efforts of Conrad Wilson's class at Conestoga High School in restoring the Van Leer Log Cabin. Under transportation we have Ed Buck's series of articles about the Lincoln Highway from the Wayne Suburban.

Bob Ward has contributed most generously to our clipping file by giving us a very large stack of xerox copies of clippings on Tredyffrin and Easttown schools that he made at the History Center in West Chester when he did his work on the schools of our two townships.

We have stacks of clippings waiting to go into this file. Some are decades old. Clippings pasted into scrap books will stay there, at least temporarily. Anything loose will be secured with archival glue to legal-sized boards and stored in legal­sized file folders. Newsprint is highly acidic. If these clippings begin to deterio­rate, they can be xeroxed for preservation. This is the approved way to con­serve such materials.

The clipping file is alphabetized by category so no card file is needed to access it. This is the way it is handled at the History Center.

research. As yet very little has been placed in acid-free folders. His files have been broadly indexed by subject on 3" x 5" cards.

Bob's work, as well as the work of three significant early Club researchers and writers, we are keeping intact. This seems worthwhile. We want to guard against losing material, and confusing future research.The Goshorn files contain xerox copies of material from the Chester County Historical Society Library (today's History Center). These photo copies will be of continuous value to us.

Many files in Bob's file cabinets were the basis for his writings for the Quarterly. Bob wrote at least 81 such articles, and many more not expressly attributed to him. Other files contain collections of material he made for articles he hoped someday to write.

Some of Bob's files are easy to work with. Others will require a vast amount of time and knowledge of local history to be successfully interpreted fully. We have a plan whereby anyone who works long and hard on a file leaves an index in the front on what is in there.

One of Bob's files was of such charm that I removed part of it and made a loose­leaf notebook of it for the bookshelves. I thought it wise to preserve it immedi­ately. This was his file on "Springhouses." Bob wrote about Springhouses in the Quarterly [Vol. 28, No.3] in 1989. His writing was only one page. It was followed by his daughter Megan's drawings of the buildings. In the file were the original photographs of springhouses used by Megan when she made her drawings. They were most likely taken in the summer of 1988. The springhouses range from Buttonwood Road in Easttown, to Yellow Springs Road in Tredyffrin. Meg's original drawings on sheer paper were in the file, along with finished drawings and xeroxes of the photographs. I left the copies of the pictures in Bob's file with a note telling where to find the preserved work.

Whatever we come upon, we try to keep in mind that this material may be a totally new experience for someone viewing it generations from now. We try to present it as clearly as possible.

What we have from Dr. Baugh are Xerox copies of some pages of his notebooks that can be found in more detail elsewhere. Art work and photographs preserved by his daughter Marion also came in the Baugh box we inherited. In another box, we found the results of research by attorney Howard Okie, who published much information in early issues of the Quarterly about local land titles. The Okie and Baugh files will not be a great quantity of paper.

On the other hand, Frank Burns' files are the ground work for our local history. His research has been the starting point for the writings of many others. I know of nothing more valuable in our collection than his history of Berwyn. We judge that Frank Burns wrote this history in the early 1920s. Much of the material, but far from all, has been published sporadically (and perhaps incompletely) over the years in the Quarterly.

We found this history tightly packed into one black loose-leaf notebook. Pages were tearing loose. We immediately separated it into two binders. The material was too delicate to Xerox by machine feed. We began the long process of copy­ing a few pages at a time. The material is typewritten. It is basically unedited. Attempts to edit it were made by Burns himself and, at some time, others. Burns' additions are helpful. We have found some of the amendments made by others to be less helpful and even incorrect.

A professional historian has told me that about a year of editing by someone who knows what they are doing, who knows local history, and has the patience of a true researcher, needs to take place if it were to be published as an entity. The pages are numbered, but unfortunately some pages are missing, and in "blocks" rather than single pages. We may come upon more, but that is unlikely at this point.

The first chapter of this work, which we now call Frank Burns' "History of Berwyn," is titled the Legendary Period 1320 -1681; the last chapter is the Centennial and Cistern Period 1876 - 1885. Burns was born in 1868. He died in 1946. He lived through the post-Civil War era, and he knew people whose parents fought in the American Revolution.

We were not far along with copying the pages of this history when, this year, Peggy Egertson took over and completed the job. We have had the copies bound at Sir Speedy. The text comprises three separate volumes. So even though it is still rough, badly in need of editing, it is available for all of us to use.

In addition to the "History," we have a box of writing tablets filled with Burns' unique handwriting. The topics are assorted: The Quakers, Valley Forge Park,

Baseball, Men and their Horses, etc. The Library at the Chester County Histori­cal Society has, in its collection, one of these Burns tablets. It is on early houses in Berwyn; to read it one is required to wear white gloves! Copies may only be made by taking pencil in hand. Our tablets are being transcribed by Peggy Egertson and Nancy Pusey. When this work is completed, we will make a bound volume to be filed with the "History" in our archives.

Local pamphlets would be, for example, on Valley Forge Park, the T/E Intermedi­ate School 1989 -1990, the Picket Post publication of Valley Forge Historical Society, and the Paoli Massacre.

Pamphlets of historical interest are these:

Women of the 1960s
The Civil War at Richmond
The Civil War at Petersburg
The U. S. Patent Office
Alexander Graham Bell
Berks County, Pennsylvania

We had thought we might sell some of the pamphlets not of direct interest to us, (for example, "The Arctic and Tropic Moon" or "Sea Shells in Florida"), but such are not a large part of the collection, and they are there to explore.

A sampling of book titles in the collection includes:

Under Pennsylvania -- former governor Samuel W. Pennypacker's book Pennsylvania in American History: Cornelius Weygant's The Plenty of Pennsylvania

Nearby localities -- A Century in Malvern and Lower Merion in History

Local -- A Week in Devon. The Episcopal Academy, The Old Eagle School by Henry Pleasants; and Valley Forge, a novel by A. W. Quimby, an early minister at the Berwyn Methodist Church

Thanks to Bob Ward, we have shelved among the books in the archives a copy of the 1798 Federal Direct Tax Assessment for Tredyffrin and East Whiteland Town-ships (the "glass tax"), and of the 1800 Federal Census for Tredyffrin, East Whiteland and Easttown. The tax and census lists were transcribed by Bob from microfilm records of the National Archives. They give us a wonderful snapshot of exactly who inhabited our local area two hundred years ago. This has to be one of the most useful research tools in our archives.

The glass tax was assessed on the number of panes of window glass, not just on windows. The tax lists are especially helpful, because they record names of actual residents as well as owners. The record is divided into five schedules. Schedule A describes each individual house, and describes its construction materials (log, brick, stone, etc.), dimensions, number of "lights" or panes of glass, and also provides data on outbuildings, location by township, owner and/or occupant, and the name of an adjoining owner of land.

Schedule B contains, among other data, information on barns, total acreage of the property, construction materials, window information and owner and/or occupant. Schedule C has data on slaves, and is omitted in our copy, perhaps because slavery was phased out in Pennsylvania beginning in 1780. Schedules D and E contain much of the information noted above but in alphabetical array.

Potts Walker, during the last years of the nineteenth century in the back. This book has been completely transcribed by Nancy Pusey. She has also taken time to correct information on a card that was presented with the book. This kind of work is most important and helpful. We do not need information that will be forever wrong.

# a piece of a Stratford signal tree
# a piece of wooden water pipe taken up from the street in Philadelphia along the Ridge Road
# Berwyn Fire Company ribbons
# Club memorabilia, a gavel, ashtray, flags
# Two tattered old American flags, one with 38 stars

Looking after the archives is a never ending project. The more work we do, the more appears to be done. Only a small amount of unboxed material still needs to find a location. Much has been accomplished in the past year.

We are in a position now to really use our archives -while we continue to pre­serve, identify, classify and clarify more precisely what we have. Even after all these months, new discoveries and understandings of what is there are made regularly.