Elverson Historic District

Elverson is the highest borough in Chester County, lying at about 870 feet above sea level. Its historic district holds roughly eighty-one contributing dwellings and fourteen commercial and public buildings, mostly stone or frame, arranged along Main and Chestnut Streets. The earliest surviving buildings date from around 1750, including stone bank houses, and the village grew up around springs on the Blue Rock Path, a trade route toward iron furnaces. The commercial core developed after the Wilmington and Northern Railroad arrived in 1870, bringing a hotel, a freight house, a coal and lumber yard and a creamery. The district is regarded as a microcosm of local architectural change, moving from eighteenth-century vernacular houses through Italianate, Second Empire and Queen Anne buildings to American Four Square and bungalow houses of the 1910s and 1920s. Its growth halted around 1930, which leaves the historic fabric largely intact.