Birchrunville Historic District

Birchrunville is a crossroads hamlet built along Birch Run in West Vincent Township, where stone and frame houses cluster around a central triangle of ground. Its first houses date to the late 1700s and early 1800s, and most village houses were built between 1840 and 1880 as modest workmen's homes. Mills on the stream, beginning with a grist mill before 1740, supported a range of trades including blacksmiths, shoemakers, carriage makers and a temperance hotel. Thomas B. Dewees, who owned much of the village real estate, built the 1898 general store with its late Victorian details, which also served as a town hall, post office and creamery. The village is regarded as a rare surviving example of a rural Southeastern Pennsylvania trading center whose buildings still reflect its nineteenth-century commercial life.