Waverly Historic District

Waverly is a village of modestly scaled, mostly two-story wood houses in Abington Township, about ten miles north of Scranton, built from the 1820s through the 1930s. Its earliest surviving house is the 1828 Greek Revival home of physician Andrew Phelps Bedford on Abington Road, and the 1830 Federal-style schoolhouse on the same road is the oldest school building in the district. Greek Revival design is the most common style, with white clapboard houses, temple-form plans and side-passage entries. The village was shaped by the Philadelphia and Great Bend Turnpike, completed in 1824, and by churches, academies and fraternal lodges established from the early nineteenth century. Waverly also has a documented connection to the Underground Railroad, and African-American families who settled along Carbondale Road after the 1850s formed a congregation whose church was built in 1854. The district's buildings and village layout remain largely intact from the period of significance, which is why the nomination treats the whole village as a unified architectural ensemble.