Despite deputy register Phineas Pemberton's desire to name it "Centretown" (thank goodness he didn't -- didn't we also have a Centrebridge and Centreville?) it's thought that the town gets its name from Thomas Wright, a man associated with William Penn.
In a letter to Penn, dated November 27, 1687, Pemberton writes 'The people here are very disappointed with Wright and his cheating tricks he played here. They think much to call it after such a runagadoe's name. I have sometimes called it Centretown, because it lies near the center of the county.'
Runagadoe? Ooo, burn.
John Chapman, said to be the first settler circa 1684, called it Twin Borough, since his wife had given birth to twins soon after their arrival there. It's also said that Chapman (an ancestor of the great Chapman-Mercer family of Doylestown) lived in a cave on what is now Penns Park Road. This sounds a little too much of a Garden-of-Eden scenario (wilderness; wife; two squalling, fresh-faced baby boys) but who knows?
In Place Names in Bucks County, author George MacReynolds speculates, 'It was probably not a cave as that term is understood now, but a 'dug out' and similar to sod houses used later my pioneer emigrants to the West.'
Two villages — Penns Park and Wycombe — are registered as Historic Villages on the National Register of Historic Places. In the Penns Park section of the township's Web site, it's mentioned there's an "old grave yard" to the southwest of the village, where many of the township's first settlers, including John Chapman, are buried. You know how I get worked up over an "old grave yard" — now I'm going to have to check it out.
According to Davis's History of Bucks County, the first graveyard, circa 1721, was on the road from Wrightstown meetinghouse to Rush valley (now Rushland). Davis says it was 'recently known as 'the school-house lot, — "recently" to Davis was 1876 — and beginning in 1770 had a wall surrounding it, but in the early 1800s Amos Doane used the stone to build a wall on his farm. Those Doanes, always up to no good.
In 1876, Davis wrote, 'There have not been any burials there within the memory of the oldest inhabitants.' Hopefully he meant inhabitants of the village, and not the cemetery.
(Click the image for a larger view.)
Date: June 24, 1975 (Staff Photographer Rudy Millarg)Homer A. Tomlinson, trustee and member since 1907, looks toward Wrightstown Friends meetinghouse.
Unrelated to the graveyard, but possibly the best thing I've learned in a while, was the last paragraph of Davis's chapter on Wrightstown:
'Near the Windy Bush road, running from the Anchor tavern, Wrightstown, stands an old stone scholl house in which, about 1845, Charles C. Burleigh was rotten-egged while advocating the abolition of negro slavery. The person who threw the eggs subsequently perished in a snow storm.'
Just to create a link. John Chapman was an ancester or Elizabeth Chapman Lawrence of the Bread Box Papers. It mentions in the early chapter that John spent the winter living in a cave in or around Wrightstown because he arrived in America too late to build a real log cabin and made it through the winter due to the friendliness of the local indiginous people who would leave deer carcauses at the entrance to his "cave". BTW, thanks for the tip on the book mentioned above, I got it last night and have just started to read it.
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