Every historic site spot we vouch for, across every town we cover. Cross a town line for the good ones. That's the whole point.
The Old Trappe Church, built between 1743 and 1745, served as a Continental Army field hospital and has been a National Historic Landmark since 1967. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg was pastor here from 1742 until his death in 1787, and the congregation still holds 8 am communion in the old stone building.
Five stories of used and rare books inside an 1822 stone barn, wood-burning stove included. Open 10 to 5:30 every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.
A 125-foot fieldstone tower raised between 1929 and 1931 atop Bowman's Hill, a few miles south of New Hope in Washington Crossing Historic Park. On a clear day the top gives you a 14-mile sweep of the Delaware and the farmland around it.
45 acres at the meeting of the Red Clay and Bucktoe creeks, part of an Audubon-designated Important Bird Area and a 30-year Cornell Lab of Ornithology bird study. The 47-foot Chandler Mill Bridge, on the National Register of Historic Places, reopened to walkers and bikes in 2020; no dogs on the trails.
A township historic farm on Creamery Road with a walking trail and a flower field.
Built in 1733 as the Half-Moon Inn, this old tavern is now the Newtown Historic Association's home, with a second-floor room devoted to Edward Hicks, the Quaker folk painter who lived in town and gave the world The Peaceable Kingdom. It only opens Sundays, 1 to 4.
The towpath runs 58.9 miles from Easton to Bristol, the last fully intact canal left from America's towpath era, and the flat, shaded New Hope stretch is the walk or bike ride you point visitors toward. Mules hauled coal barges down this water into the 1930s, and the Locktender's House by the lock still lays out how the whole thing worked.
The old mule-towpath runs flat and straight through the middle of Yardley, part of a 59-mile canal path from Easton down to Bristol that Congress named a National Historic Landmark. Point a bike south and it's about 4.5 shaded miles to Washington Crossing, with ice cream stops along the way.
An early-1700s log house on West Lancaster Ave, one of the oldest buildings still standing in town. Preserved as a small museum of early Downingtown life.
The borough's own historical society runs walking tours, lectures, and a research archive on Doylestown's past from its South Main Street home. Thirty years in, it is now marking America's 250th with new publications and programs.
A pocket of riverbank at the foot of Ferry Street where the Delaware slides past and Lambertville sits across the water. Washington's army crossed here at Coryell's Ferry in June 1778 on the way to Monmouth; now it's a few sculptures, some benches, and the ducks.
Henry Mercer's concrete castle: 44 rooms, 18 fireplaces, over 200 windows, poured by hand with the help of a horse named Lucy. Every surface is tiled — his own Arts and Crafts work alongside Persian and Spanish pieces he collected.
A living-history museum in the 1877 A.M.E. church on South Canal Street, telling the African American and women's history most Bucks County guides walk right past. Storytelling here leans on West African Griot tradition instead of wall text, and you can catch the exhibits weekend afternoons or by appointment during the week.
The Keith House is the only surviving residence of a colonial Pennsylvania governor, anchoring the 42-acre grounds of Horsham's lone National Historic Landmark. Guided tours run Friday through Sunday; the nature trails and picnic spots are yours the rest of the time.
The stone castle at the center of Arcadia University's campus on South Easton Road. A former private mansion with turrets, and the building people mean when they say the castle in Glenside.
An 18th-century stone house and working farmstead on Harriton Road, kept as a museum by the township. Guided tours, and public events out on the grounds.
A historic Pennsylvania German farmstead at the center of a 36-acre Lower Salford park, ringed by a nature trail, bike path, playground, ball fields, and a pavilion. The old house and barn are the draw; the park around them does the everyday work.
More than 900 acres of woods, meadows, and trails wrapped around a 19th-century ironmaster's mansion just north of town. Chambers Lake handles the boating and fishing, mansion tours run many Sunday afternoons, and the campground opens weekends April through mid-November.
A mansion completed in 1796 on a 59-acre historic site, with a 2-acre formal garden behind massive stone walls, restored to its look circa 1925-1935. The gardens are free to walk dawn to dusk every day; mansion tours are by appointment, Monday through Thursday.
A Georgian mansion built between 1743 and 1748 by Quaker entrepreneur Samuel Morris, possibly with advice from Edmund Woolley, the architect of Independence Hall. Washington's Continental Army camped in the Whitemarsh Hills from November 2 to December 11, 1777; guided tours run most Sundays, April through October.
Preserved 19th-century crossroads village with a general store, carriage museum, the circa-1805 Garrett House, and a working book bindery. Grounds are open daily 9 to 5 year-round; guided tours run Saturdays and Sundays May through November, with parking at 273 Boot Road.
A 1760s mansion that served as George Washington's headquarters December 8 to 14, 1776, and was later owned by Robert Morris and George Clymer, both signers of the Declaration and the Constitution. The Historic Morrisville Society opens it for $7 tours the first Saturday of each month, 10 to 1.
Three museum buildings along West Main Street in Trappe, the next borough over from Collegeville: the Speaker's House, the Muhlenberg House, and Dewees Tavern, whose five galleries hold Pennsylvania German furniture, fraktur, textiles, and pottery. Open Fridays through Sundays in summer, with Muhlenberg House tours departing on the hour from Dewees Tavern.
Georgian house museum that was home to Revolutionary War general Anthony Wayne, held by seven generations of the Wayne family from 1724 to 1965. Now a National Historic Landmark on ten acres in neighboring Paoli, run by PhilaLandmarks as a tour-able house museum.
Kennett Square's local-history museum, on North Union. A good stop for the town's Underground Railroad and mushroom-country past.
The 1770-era Jenkins Homestead, the oldest building within Lansdale's original borders, restored and open to visitors one block off Main Street. The research center 60 feet away holds the society's archive of Lansdale and North Penn documents and artifacts.
The stone house on West Broad where the Liberty Bell reportedly spent a night in September 1777, hidden from the British on its wagon haul from Philadelphia up to Allentown. A quiet local landmark most people drive past without knowing what happened here.
The restored locktender's house at Lock 11, run by the Friends of the Delaware Canal as a small museum of how mule-drawn boats moved cargo through here for a hundred years starting in 1832. The lock out front was rebuilt to working order, the first one running on the Delaware Canal in more than 50 years.
Open since 1727, which makes it one of the five oldest continuously running inns in the country and a Revolutionary War field hospital before it was a whiskey lounge. Come on a cold night for the wood-burning fireplaces and the live piano in the bar.
American cooking inside the Red Lion Inn, a Main Street building that's been an inn since the 1700s. Order a burger and a beer under ceilings that have seen a couple of centuries of the same.
A 1695 meetinghouse founded by Welsh Quakers who arrived in 1682, now a National Historic Landmark and the second-oldest Friends meetinghouse in the country. It is still an active congregation, with silent worship every Sunday at 11 am and a burial ground holding an estimated 2,000 graves, many unmarked in early Quaker custom.
An 1874 covered bridge over the Perkiomen's northeast branch, burned by arson in 2004 and rebuilt in period lattice-truss style, reopening in February 2008. One salvaged piece of the original truss is built into the new frame, and it still carries about 2,000 cars a day just outside town.
Henry Mercer built this tile factory between 1911 and 1912, and it still presses handmade Moravian tiles today. Tour the historic workshops and watch the craftsmen at work, or make your own 3-inch tile to pick up about four weeks later.
Log house museum on a Towamencin property established in 1708, covering life here from that year through 1960. Guided tours run Fridays through Sundays at noon, 1, and 2 from April to December, and the grounds are open sunrise to sunset at no charge.
The 1784 fieldstone house of Benjamin Parry, whose New Hope Mills eventually handed the town its name. Its eleven rooms are furnished a generation apart, walking you from 1775 to 1900 without leaving Main Street.
The Newtown Historic Association's free archive, where you can pull deeds, wills, diaries, and photographs back to 1725, when Newtown was the county seat. It keeps a deep file on Edward Hicks, the Quaker preacher and folk painter who lived here, and opens for house-history and genealogy digs Tuesday mornings and Thursday nights.
America's oldest continuously operating movie theater: it screened footage of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 and never stopped. The 1883 brick building on State Street still runs about 50 films a year, plus tribute bands and stand-up nights.
A late-1800s Queen Anne mansion and its water tower anchor this Westtown Township park, with 1.2 miles of trails, a pond, playground, and pavilion around them. Grounds are open sunrise to sunset; the mansion itself rents out for weddings.
The site of the 1777 Battle of Paoli, where a British night bayonet raid on Anthony Wayne's men turned into a Revolutionary War rallying cry. Open ground with walking paths and one of the oldest war monuments in the country.
This is the Paoli Battlefield, where Continental soldiers were killed in a 1777 night raid during the Revolution. Now it's quiet grounds on Monument Avenue with one of the country's oldest Revolutionary War memorials and marked graves.
The stone farmhouse where Nobel and Pulitzer winner Pearl S. Buck lived, now a National Historic Landmark museum on a 67-acre estate with prize-winning gardens and the newly opened Green Hills Farm Arboretum. House tours run $15 for adults, and the grounds host Perkasie's own Little Theater Workshop for outdoor summer Shakespeare.
Governor Samuel Pennypacker's mansion, a circa-1720 house redesigned and enlarged in 1901 by architect Arthur Brockie, runs free guided tours starting on the hour and half-hour, Tuesday through Sunday. The rooms are still fully furnished with the antiques he collected chasing early Pennsylvania history.
Sixty-odd Carpenter Gothic cottages, gingerbread trim and all, ringed around an open-air auditorium: a Methodist camp-meeting community that opened in 1882 and never really shut down. Founders' Day in early August is when the private grounds open up for cottage tours.
Built in 1912 so the Lehigh Valley Transit trolley could duck under the Reading Railroad, this stone tunnel carried the interurban line that ran hourly from Allentown down to Philadelphia until the cars stopped in 1951. The trolleys are long gone, but the tunnel still stands on the old right-of-way, one of the last things you can walk up and touch from that line.
Restored 1758 Pennsylvania German farmhouse where George Washington headquartered in 1777, now a Montgomery County historic site with livestock and a kitchen garden. Guided tours run on the hour Tuesday through Sunday, suggested donation $2.
The neighborhood playground inside Narbrook Park, the historic garden-suburb enclave in Narberth. Bring the kids and let them run.
The keepers of Quakertown's back catalog, from the borough's Quaker roots to whatever the town looked like a century ago. Their North Main address is where you go when you want the real story behind an old building.
The restored train station on Front Street, kept up by volunteers who care about how Quakertown moved by rail. A small stop for anyone who likes old depots and the era they belong to.
Founded in 1788, which makes it one of the oldest subscription libraries in Pennsylvania. It sits on South Main and has outlasted nearly everything around it.
The town's whole history stuffed into an old schoolhouse: 19th-century farm tools, local sports memorabilia, and fashion sketches by designer Katherine Berkemeyer spread across two floors. It only opens the second full weekend of the month, noon to 4, and the special-exhibit room swaps its topic every time you come back.
The keeper of Skippack's local history, over on Evansburg Road. Come for the archives, old photographs, and the village's story back to its early settlement days.
Bucks County's oldest covered bridge, built in 1832 and hauled a mile to Lenape Park over eight days in 1958 to save it from demolition. Hurricane Ida shifted it about 15 feet off its abutments in 2021, so for now it's a look-from-the-outside landmark while a FEMA-funded restoration works through the pipeline.
A 75-foot Burr truss covered bridge from 1881, on the National Register since 1980 and carrying cars over Buck Run again since a faithful 2016 PennDOT rebuild (an overloaded steel truck wrecked the original span in 2011). Its identical twin, the Mary Ann Pyle Bridge, stands a quarter-mile away.
Andrew McMinn opened this tavern in 1772, and it spent the 1840s pouring nothing alcoholic, which is how it landed the name; the bar now runs 33 taps. The scratch kitchen leans Latin and European under colonial fireplaces where folk painter Edward Hicks once turned up.
The riverbank where Washington's army crossed the Delaware on Christmas night 1776, kept as a historic village with the Thompson-Neely House, a grist mill, and soldiers' graves. Grounds are open dawn to dusk and the visitor center runs daily 10 to 5, about ten minutes up River Road from Yardley.
Two white suspension footbridges the WPA strung across Lake Lenape in 1938, modeled on the same Roebling design behind the Brooklyn Bridge. Roughly 500 feet of towers and cable over the creek, and still the only suspension bridges anywhere in Pennridge.
Keepers of the Old Library by Lake Afton, an 1878 building where Yardley's deeds, maps, and old photographs actually live where you can see them. They also run walking tours down the Delaware Canal towpath, which is the version of town history you take on foot.
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