Gladwyne Historic District

At the crossroads of Youngs Ford and Righters Mill Roads, about ten miles from central Philadelphia, lies a village of stone and stucco houses, shops and an inn that grew up in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Known as Merion Square, it developed from land sales beginning around 1798, when George Helmbold built a stone house at the crossroads. Much of the village was served by nearby mills on Mill Creek and by papermakers who bought land there. The district holds 87 structures, with the mill and farm workers' house as its predominant type, often in stucco over rubble stone. Its buildings have changed little since the mid-1800s and retain a continuity of scale and materials, from the Georgian-era War Office to the Guard House Inn, which dates from several nineteenth-century stages. The village is regarded as one of the last intact examples of a Pennsylvania crossroads village.