Ridge Valley Rural Historic District

Farmsteads of stone and frame line the creeks and winding dirt and paved roads of Tinicum Township in northern Bucks County, where the land drops sharply into a valley of exposed shale and wooded slopes. The district holds 77 resources, including fourteen houses, twelve bank barns, six bridges and two fords. Settlement began in the late eighteenth century, and the 1798 Federal Direct Tax recorded log houses that were later replaced by stone, which remained the main building material well into the mid-nineteenth century. Its farms were relatively modest, with few large houses, and the steep, hilly land limited mechanized farming after World War II. Few farms were modernized, so the district keeps a nineteenth-century character. In the late 1920s and 1930s, New York artists, including Charles Rudy and John Wexley, bought farms here, and their conversions helped preserve the district. The district is regarded as a well preserved example of farming in small stream valleys.