Category: Phoenixville

Last week we made mention of a railroad tragedy on the Pickering Valley Railroad, where a cow on the tracks led to the death of an engineer. But an 1877 storm led to a much bigger disaster, at the time the most fatal train wreck in Chester County history. On Oct. 4, 1877, a…

Hoxsie was surprised to search through an online archive of California newspapers and find more than a few stories that originated in his newish hometown of Phoenixville, PA. Some were of tragedy, some were of no consequence at all, but all were printed a long way from where they happened. In this case, the…

We know much about the history of iron and steel in Phoenixville – it was the Phoenix Iron Works that gave the borough its name, after all (prior to incorporation in 1849, the village was known as Manavon). But there was also a significant textile industry, including a number of knitting mills, which are…

A volume called “Chester County and Its People,” by W.W. Thomson in 1898, relates that during the War of the Rebellion, “At Phoenixville David Reeves, president of the Phoenix Iron Works, gave notice that any of his employes [sic] enlisted in the army they should have the houses they lived in, owned by the…

The United States entered the Second World War in 1941, which brought, shall we say, a reaction from Germany. Part of that reaction was sending U-boats to the eastern sea routes, where they proved pretty effective at sinking our oil tankers that brought oil up to the northeast from the Gulf of Mexico. 46…

As we’ve said before, this blog devoted to random snippets of history from Albany, Schenectady, and Troy will certainly not be stooping so low as to have a feature called “Phoenixville Phriday” just because we’ve moved to a new town far from our roots. Just because it’s Friday, and just because this one’s about…

In a non-regular feature that we will not be calling “Phoenixville Phriday,” Hoxsie is going to step away from chronicling historical trivia of its ancestral lands and momentarily turn its attention to the history of its new hometown, Phoenixville, PA.  Phoenixville was a small steel town that also cranked out finished bridges; if you…