History streets: Walking tours of West Chester

The Chester County History Center has started taking lovers of history on local walks around West Chester. These treks back in time are very quickly becoming among the hottest tickets in town History streets

Photo by Richard L. Gaw

Anne Skillman, left, and Jennifer Green of the Chester County History Center provide complete narration during each tour.

By Richard L. Gaw Staff Writer

It is an early autumn weeknight at the Chester County History Center (CCHC) on North High Street in West Chester, and 16 guests gather on the building’s front patio and prepare for an evening that will take them back in time.

Over the course of the next 90 minutes – under the guidance of CCHS’ Director of Education Jennifer Green and CCHC Public Program Coordinator Anne Skillman – the guests embark on a 1.7-mile trek along High, Market and Gay streets and through all of the nooks and crannies of West Chester.

At different locations, Green and Skillman hold up their lanterns and tell of local fables and macabre truths of murder, mischief and hijinks, all of which happened at or near where they now stand, between 1838 and 1907. Pulled from the Chester County Archives’ coroner’s records, county prison records and old newspaper clippings, each story becomes more riveting than the one before it. To each guest, the Borough of West Chester is gradually no longer a downtown of packed restaurants and strolling college students, but a history lesson about false identifications, exhumed cadavers, the Grimm family, prison gallows, buried bones and public hangings.

This is “Chilling West Chester II,” and it is part of a new walking tour series launched by CCHC in 2020 that is drawing sold-out audiences whose fascination with local history is

taking them out of the pages of books and classrooms and into the streets of West Chester.

“The History Center has had walks in the past, but they were infrequent, and typically they were about general or architectural history,” said Green, who became CCHC’s Director of Education last September. “Last year, we were in the middle of COVID-19 and couldn’t have indoor events. The education staff put its heads together to come up with ways we could continue to do programming and raise revenue during the pandemic, and the common sense solution was to take our programming outside.”

CCHC launched “Chilling West Chester I” last October and November, which was followed by its “Holiday History Stroll” that introduced guests to what the holidays looked like in West Chester during the 19th Century. This past April, CCHC conducted a series of tours entitled “Sick in the City,” that discussed infectious diseases and their treatment during the time West Chester experienced outbreaks of cholera, smallpox and yellow fever during the late 1800s and early

Courtesy of the Chester County History Center

All 13 of the Center’s “Underground Railroad of West Chester” walking tours were sold out.

1900s, as well as introduced some of the most prominent physicians in the community.

Wrapping its next tour around Mother’s Day, CCHC did walking tours that highlighted the history of candy shops and confectionary stores in West Chester, which at its most prominent, featured 13 such businesses within a four-block radius.

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To date, however, CCHC’s most popular event has been its “The Underground Railroad in West Chester” walking tour that featured 13 sold-out performances beginning in June and ending in August. The 1.25-mile, 75-minute tour stopped at 8 locations in downtown West Chester, where Green and Skillman introduced some of the individuals who played a significant role in the struggle toward freedom and equality, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman.

If there is a supporting actor lending support to Green and Skillman, it is West Chester itself, whose side streets and historic homes lend themselves visually to the tours.

“Both the joy and the frustration of West Chester is that while some of the best stops are where the buildings are no longer there in the downtown vicinity, many of the places that we talk about in the neighborhoods that surround downtown are very much still there,” Green said. “As we do different tours, we often talk about the same building – on a tour that has a story from 1785 and then again on a different tour during 1865.

“It builds the layers of the life story that is West Chester.”

Following its annual Halloween Ball on Oct. 30 – CCHC’s largest fundraiser that helps pay for educational programs and for the Center’s

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Photos by Richard L. Gaw

The content of each of the Center’s walking tours comes from extensive historical research.

The Chester County History Center makes a stop along High Street in West Chester during its recent “Chilling West Chester II” walking tour.

preservation efforts -- Green and Skillman are currently preparing to debut “Notorious,” that will highlight some of West Chester’s most wanted criminals; a tour that will feature stories about West Chester’s most famous entertainers, musicians, artists and writers; and a tour that will focus on women’s history.

From a marketing perspective, Skillman suspects that part of the reason why the walking tours have become an immediate success is that they are a reaction to the lockdown of COVID-19 that has seen an increase in the amount of outdoor recreation and activity being offered.

“I also think the success of these walks comes from a thirst to get back to a sense of community,” Skillman said. “We offer a sense of straight history of the people. We don’t sensationalize or glamorize it, and we set it within a proper context. There is a universality to the message behind these walks.”

“What I like to reinforce during these tours is that human nature for 300 years has remained the same,” Green added. “The same things we’re dealing with now are the same things we were dealing with centuries ago. There was crime. There were shootings, and there

Courtesy of the Chester County History Center

The Center’s “Chilling West Chester II” gave a walking narrative of some of the more macabre stories in West Chester history.

were epidemics. There is a clear connection between West Chester in 2021 and West Chester in 1821.”

The Chester County History Center is located at 225 North High Street in West Chester. To learn more about the Chester County History Center and its walking tours of West Chester, visit www.chestercohistorical.org, or call 610-6924800. Tickets for each walking tour can be purchased at the Center’s website.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email rgaw@chestercounty.com.

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