When local historians from bordering counties get together, great things happen!

This program will discuss some of the many similarities that both the White Rose and the Red Rose counties have in common including architecture, industry, religion, entertainment, and much more! From their founding until now, York and Lancaster have shared a storied history, divided only by the Susquehanna River.

Learn more about our presenters here.

The Second Saturday Series is presented on the second Saturday of each month. Speakers present on a wide variety of topics from York County’s 270 years of history including people, places, and events that have had local, regional, or national impact. Most programs are held in the Meeting Hall at the Historical Society Museum and begin at 10:30. If any program is at a different location or time that will be noted under the title of the program. Attending any of these presentations is free and open to the public.
June’s speaker will be Jaime Noerpel. After earning a B.A. in history and secondary education from York College in 2012, Jamie Noerpel landed her dream job at Milton Hershey School where she teaches history to 9th and 10th graders. Since then, she’s earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in American studies from Penn State with a focus on agriculture, environmental studies, African American literature, and folklore. In her free time, she builds on the public history of YoCo. She co-founded a website called Witnessing York, writes a local history blog for YDR called Wandering in York County, films videos through a series called Hometown History, and launched Project Penny Heaven – an initiative to install a permanent monument in York’s potter’s field.

Close to 800 bodies rest under the surface of a grassy field in North York— a cemetery for the unknown or poor people. When the deceased had no family, no financial means, or were unidentified, they would be interred in the City Cemetery, also known as potter’s field and Penny Heaven. Their names meant little, buried anonymously in a remote area and segregated from people who paid for their plots, save Clashay Johnson, the only name on the only gravestone. In this presentation, Jamie Noerpel will teach you about the history of Penny Heaven, including the stories of people interred there such as P.T. Barnum’s Figi cannibal. Her talk will dive deeper into conversations surrounding the intersection of class and race, as well as current efforts to raise money for a permanent monument to recognize those previously unrecognized.

With the passing of time, many of the stories that are told become forgotten. Many of the people who have walked the streets of York, the same ones we all walk today, have been forgotten, lost to time just as anything else. However, sometimes these people are kept alive by living family members. Others are hidden, only to be found through research. Libraries, archives, historical records and oral records are all time capsules that preserve the stories and histories of the people of our not-so-distant past. There are people in York today that know some of these histories that have been forgotten. It is the duty of all of us to know and recognize the histories of those who came before us, especially if those histories have been hidden. Whose hidden past would you like our community to know? Join us as we uncover Hidden Histories.

Join us from 6pm-7pm on Wednesday, June 14 at First Presbyterian Church’s Café 225. Enjoy coffee! Guy Dunham, a retired pastor of twelve different congregations, will speak at First Presbyterian Church on David Etter Small, an advocate for freedom seekers in the 1800s. This FREE program invites the community to learn history and discuss its impacts in a casual atmosphere.

Spirits of the Past: Historic Mixology classes will be held quarterly.  Each class will include at least one cocktail that participants will make themselves with guided instructions, light refreshments, and a brief presentation on how, when, and where the cocktails would have been imbibed.

Our cocktail selection for June's program:

Hurricane & Avopassion

Anchored by Juneteenth and Independence Day – two dates that highlight the gap between our nation’s promises and practices – Civic Season is about welcoming the future inheritors of the United States to learn about our nation’s history so they can use it to inform and inspire civic participation for generations to come.

The York County History Center is one of the over 300 organizations participating in this year's Civic Season!

Visit our website for more details.

When York County and America observed the Battle of Gettysburg centennial in 1963, York’s newspapers covered community observations in Wrightsville and Hanover. But there was scant coverage of York’s role a century before when the Confederates raided the county in the days before fighting at Gettysburg. Jim McClure traces the way York has discussed – or sat in silence- in regard to those days marked by York’s fathers’ surrender of the town to the Confederates. He follows the telling of York’s Civil War and related Underground Railroad story up to the current day, a moment marked by extensive and thoughtful research into those days when the Confederates marched across York County soil.

James McClure is a retired editor of the York Daily Record/ York Sunday News and USA Today Network’s state editor for Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland.

This program will be available in person and virtually.

For in-person registration, please click here.

For Zoom registration, please click here.

ALLVETS is a non-profit organization, founded in 2015 by the late Jim Bean, a Vietnam veteran, to collect the stories of local veterans. Each month a different veteran from any branch of the military who served in any capacity shares his or her story about their service to our country.