Upper Aquetong Valley

Home to the region's earliest English Quaker settlement, the Upper Aquetong Valley maintains a distinct collection of dispersed family farmsteads from the 1750s.

Deviating from William Penn's plans for strong, central townships with neatly-arranged agricultural villages, the founding Quakers farmed 100- to 200-acre rectangular lots with buildings clustered in the center, away from the cartways and township roads. While other lands were subdivided into smaller and smaller lots, the Upper Aquetong homesteads retained their original design and many were still farmed by the same families as late as 1891.

Upper Aquetong ValleyRoadways, canals and railroads altered much of the region but left the Upper Aquetong Valley largely untouched, and it remains today one of the few pristine examples of the first farming settlements in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, its farmland and buildings preserve the founding heritage of the Quaker State.