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GOD'S COUNTRY... ...Bucks County, Pennsylvania
You might not think all that could come together just from looking at a map. Bucks County sits directly in the path of the ever-sprawling Northeastern megalopolis, bordering Philadelphia on its southeast, Trenton NJ on its northeast and Allentown to its north. Even New York City is only a little over an hour away--a few folks from the county actually commute daily to Manhattan. Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor slices right through it, and so do some major highways like the I-95 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Nor has Bucks managed to avoid the urban exodus and subsequent suburban land boom. It was here, after opening Levittown, NY, in 1947, that Alfred and William Levitt built a second planned suburb of Levittown, PA, in the early 1950s. Their low-cost housing for returning WWII veterans was a marvelous idea for the time, though this creation of suburban America set an unfortunate pattern that has proved rapacious. Whatever one’s attachment to liberty and free enterprise, it is hard for the poetic soul to mark it as unalloyed progress when local farms and woods get ground up, paved over and dotted with cookie-cutter construction. And yet somehow, amidst the noxious congestion of the modern American urbs, amidst a seemingly unstoppable land grab, Bucks County remains an oasis of natural serenity and historical perspective. Sometimes, unexpectedly tucked away in the middle of a modern development, you’ll catch a glimpse of an old stone farmhouse a few centuries young and none the worse for wear, and, I like to think, smiling inwardly at the fact that it will still be cherished while its larger and less sturdy neighbors disintegrate into piles of lumber. And Bucks is nothing if not a land of history. The county’s first inhabitants (that we know of anyway) were the Delaware Indians--a tribe which would later become renowned as great warriors and hunters of the plains, but who seem in their woodland homeland to have stayed rather tranquil (unlike their New York neighbors the Iroquois, who famously bragged at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1742 that they put petticoats on the Delawares and made women out of them). In the late 1600s Lower Bucks was ruled by the once famous chief Tamanend. If you know the name at all, you might recall him as the ancient but commanding patriarch from James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. In colonial times he was even jokingly referred to (and not by Catholics either) as St. Tammany, the patron of America. The missionary John Heckewelder said of Tamanend, “He was, in the highest degree, endowed with wisdom, virtue, prudence, charity, affability, meekness, hospitality; in short with every good and noble qualification that a human being may possess.” All the more ironic, then, that his name was unfortunately appropriated for one of the most corrupt political machines in American political history, Tammany Hall. The real Tamanend was best known in the context of his friendship with an equally magnanimous man from a faraway island of the Old World. William Penn, an enterprising English Quaker from Buckinghamshire, cashed in a favor his father had rendered to the English crown in the form of a land grant in America. This was the foundation of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and though here Philadelphia has deservedly gotten most of the historical attention--it was after all Penn’s quasi-Utopian pet project--it was actually slightly to the north where he built his own New World home in 1683, naming a county there after his home in England. His reconstructed Pennsbury Manor, in the southeastern corner of the county, is a great place to visit for a glimpse into that early colonial experience. To see how Tamanend’s folk lived, about a half hour away in Churchville there’s a modest outdoor recreation of a Lenape Indian village in Churchville County Park, with wigwams the kids would delight in exploring. Few meetings of native and Englishman were so amicable, and Voltaire famously stated that the Great Treaty signed by Penn and Tamanend was “the only treaty never sworn to, and never broken.” Not, at least, for many years. For Penn’s fair dealings with the Indians were not kept up by his descendants, and it took trickery in the form of the Walking Purchase to wrest the original inhabitants of all their original territory--markers have now been placed at the start and end of this bit of geographical chicanery. Colonial times in America came to an end right about the moment we stopped being a colony. And perhaps that transition would never have been made at all if in December of 1776, General George Washington hadn't used Bucks County as the staging point for one of the most storied military episodes in American history. On Christmas Night, when Hessian mercenaries were soused from holiday carousing, his men forayed across the Delaware River and scored morale-boosting victories at Trenton and Princeton. There are few better ways to commemorate this event than to relive it at Washington Crossing Historic Park on Christmas Day, when colonial re-enactors put on period military drills and then row across the sometimes difficult river all over again--landing in New Jersey to the cheers of modern-day patriots. Bucks County even had something of an “American medieval” era in the early 1900s, thanks to local scholar, antiquarian and self-taught architect Henry Chapman Mercer. Mercer built two concrete castles--yes, actual castles--in the county seat of Doylestown: one for his personal estate, and one for his antiquarian collection of tools and implements of old Americana. Both of these historic buildings are open to the public today. The Mercer Museum is literally packed to the roof with the ordinary implements of old America, from thimbles and hairpins to whaleboats, giant apple presses and carriages. No worry about the kids being bored here--even if the exhibits don't catch their attention they won't fail to enjoy the winding staircases and innumerable nooks and crannies. Mercer’s Fonthill, now a museum, was his private home and its concrete walls and ceilings are studded throughout with handmade tiles. Also worth seeing in Doylestown are the Moravian Tile Works and the Michener Art Museum. For the womenfolk, country quaintness and Americana are available in buckets, particularly throughout the northern and central parts of county. Romantic getaways are easy to plan at the many bed and breakfasts, and there are antique dealers galore particularly along the Delaware. For country crafts there's also Peddler's Village in Lahaska, a colonial-themed outdoor shopping center. The small boroughs of Lower Bucks are interesting historical studies in themselves. Langhorne and Newtown both have eminently walkable downtowns, with houses that date from the 1700s. The arts and croissants crowd may enjoy New Hope, a pretty town along the Delaware River known regionally for its artists and locally for its bohemian lifestyle. In the early 1900s the town was the artistic center for the “Pennsylvania Impressionists,” who were painting beautiful, realistic renderings of natural and pastoral scenes while their European counterparts were getting high off the brute ugliness of modernism. It's not hard to figure out where such visual inspiration would have come from. There is a quiet, understated natural beauty to Bucks County, not only along the picturesque banks of the Delaware River, but also along its backbone waterway, the Neshaminy Creek. Tyler State Park in Newtown is about 1000 acres of land, with copious foot, bicycle and horse trails, and my personal favorite: canoe rentals. The Schofield Ford covered bridge, built in 1873, has long been an attraction in the park; the original burned down in 1991 but was carefully reconstructed six years later. It is one of a dozen covered bridges still standing in the county, some of which are now used for car traffic--this one, however, remains true to its foot-and-horse-only origins, and a trip across it brings you right back to the 19th century. Further north and far more spectacular is Tohickon Gorge in Ralph Stover State Park, which offers serious outdoor activities like whitewater rafting and rock climbing on a 200-foot sheer rock face. Lake Nockamixon in Quakertown is great for boat lovers--all the way from canoeing and windsurfing to catamarans and sailboats. Point Pleasant along the Delaware is the self-described capital of river tubing. While it's now past the time of year for watersports, and while New England may be the place for changing leaves, Bucks County is no slouch in this regard, and one can find apple picking, hayrides and other family activities that are a welcome respite from a new season of TV schlock. Your littlest ones might be tugging on your pantlegs to dive into the colorful fun of Sesame Place, a one-of-a-kind amusement park in Langhorne based on the Sesame Street characters, and more oriented around exploration than inducing vertigo (my favorite once upon a time was climbing the rope nets).
Oh, and to address the perennial problem of the traveling Catholic, the local parishes are generally pretty good about keeping liturgical shenanigans to a minimum, thanks to the overall conservatism of the Philadelphia archdiocese. Parish churches I can personally recommend are St. John Bosco in Warminster, and St. Ann's in Bristol, a pretty old Italian church run by the Trinitarian order, and the Czestochowa shrine in Doylestown. Beautiful Eastern Catholic churches include St. Mary's (Ukranian) in Bristol. Unfortunately, there's no traditional rite Latin Mass in the county itself, but you can find one close by at Our Lady of Consolation in the Tacony section of Philadelphia, Sundays at 2:00 PM. In this tourist-package age, where one can ride an air-conditioned bus to some spectacular tucked-away wonder of God’s creation, snap a few pictures, ransack the gift shop and be back on the highway all within a half hour, Bucks County probably is not high on the priority list. There aren't a plethora of awe-inspiring spectacles to gawk at. It is a simple place, a land of history and tradition feeling its way into modernity, yet conscious of a need to cling to its classically American heritage. It is a feast for the humble eye, for anyone who can find it profoundly delightful to stand on ground hallowed by great men and women, or to envelop oneself in history at the corner of colonial roads, covered bridges and old alleyways, or to just marvel at the natural beauty of a golden cornfield or the wooded bend of a creek. It is a county of myriad small delights. It's no coincidence to me that that ancient and beautiful name of Neshaminy looks very like the Hebrew word “neshama” used in the Old Testament for the breath of life that God breathed into Adam. For in the quarter century that I have lived near its banks, I have always felt there a Divine Artistry that never fails to stir the soul to its depths, and which, like all the gifts of God, is most intensely appreciated the greater the receiver’s humility. Claudio Salvucci is an editor at Arx Publishing, housed in a hundred-year old mill in Bristol, Bucks County’s only port city. |
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A great introduction
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