Hopewell Historic District

This quiet valley was once something of a laboratory for how a nineteenth-century Pennsylvania community could work.

Hopewell was incorporated as a borough in eighteen fifty-three and operated until nineteen fourteen, when it was absorbed into surrounding townships. Before that it was the domain of the Dickey family, who arrived in the early eighteen hundreds and shaped the valley for generations. Samuel Dickey, who lived from seventeen sixty-nine to eighteen thirty-five, was a noted agricultural innovator. The family used the water power of the local streams to develop mills and brought progressive farming techniques to the region. They also pushed to establish area schools at a time when rural education was scarce.

Much of the nineteenth-century character of the valley endures today in the land and its buildings, a rare case where a small community's history is still legible in the landscape.