Jacobus: New Paradise, Renamed for Misdelivered Mail
Near York, Pennsylvania
When the first house went up here in eighteen thirty-seven, the settlement was called New Paradise. It was a reasonable name. The corner of Main and Water Streets in Springfield Township had a hotel, a wagon shop, a cigar factory, and residents of mostly German descent who had settled comfortably into the York County farmland.
The name became a problem when the post office opened. Mail kept arriving at the wrong destination: Paradise in Lancaster County, not New Paradise in York County. The postal confusion required a solution, and the postmaster at the time was a man named Jacob Geiselman. The town was renamed Jacobus in his honor, and the mix-ups stopped. The borough incorporated in nineteen twenty-nine, making it the youngest municipality in York County. Its population today is about eighteen hundred.
