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History · Gordonville

Gordonville’s post office opened in 1850, and 39% of its homes were built before 1940

Below: old-book passages.

1850first post office
0on the National Register
39%homes built before 1940
1famous people
Quick answers

How Gordonville began

When was Gordonville founded?

1850

The Gordonville post office opened in 1850, the earliest record of the town by name.

2020 census: 523176 years
Founding year: the first Gordonville post office (Blevins & Helbock, CC0).The full story ↓

What stands out about Gordonville’s past

Read from the archive, the National Register and the record. The page puts what stands out first.

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Start Gordonville’s collection

The first neighbors to add old photos shape how Gordonville’s history is told.

Decades since 1900 with photos
00s10s20s30s40s50s60s70s80s90s
0 of 10 decades. The empty ones are waiting for someone’s album.
The story

How Gordonville came to be

From Wikipedia’s history of Gordonville.

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Gordonville is located on part of a grant of 2,300 acres (9.3 km2) of land to the Mary Feree family by the sons of William Penn. The town resulted from the railroad that planned to pass through the area. Around 1829 land was surveyed for the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, chartered in 1823 and again in 1826, to run between Philadelphia and Columbia, a growing city along the Susquehanna River south of Harrisburg. Land on the south and west side of the railway route belonged to the Christian Hershey family, which was associated with the land from as early as 1709. Daniel Gordon erected the first dwelling on land now associated with the village in 1832 (some say 1834), a 2+1⁄2-story, five-bay brick farmhouse with central doorway, largely intact gallery under gable roof, with first floor windows on facade to floor. The house was inhabited by Henry Eckert in the 1880s, and is still occu…

Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.

From the old history books

What they wrote about Gordonville in 1883

Passages that mention Gordonville, cut from the printed page as they were published.

That portion of the village lying on the easlern side of the railroad was for a time called Concord, but the post-office which iiad been established at the village was named Gordonville. The name Concord was by degrees dropped, and the whulc village is now known as Gordonville.
History of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania1883Read the page →
Read the text

That portion of the village lying on the easlern side of the railroad was for a time called Concord, but the post-office which iiad been established at the village was named Gordonville. The name Concord was by degrees dropped, and the whulc village is now known as Gordonville.

Text read by machine from the scan; it may contain errors.

Scans and text from the Internet Archive. Books published in 1930 or earlier, which are in the public domain.

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Questions about Gordonville’s history

What year was Gordonville founded?

The Gordonville post office opened in 1850, the earliest record of the town by name (U.S. post office records).

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Sources

Where this page comes from

Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →

From Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikipedia for famous people and old county and town histories (Internet Archive). Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.