Fourteen Historic Sites<\/h3>\n
Germantown\u2019s history has frequently been the subject of regional and national attention.\u00a0Architects working on the Depression-era Historic American Buildings Survey began the path-breaking national survey of historic structures by examining twelve houses in Germantown.\u00a0The National Park Service has served as a steward of one Germantown site (the Deshler Morris House) since 1948 and the National Trust for Historic Preservation of another (Cliveden) since 1972.\u00a0From the 1950s to the 1970s, some of the nation\u2019s top urban planners devoted their energies to devise solutions to Germantown\u2019s economic decline and population loss mostly based on capitalizing on its historic assets.\u00a0Today, the presence of fourteen historic sites testifies to a century\u2019s worth of preservation efforts.\u00a0Those museums, however, have not always been interested in producing new knowledge; rather they preserved how life was lived long ago.<\/p>\n
Until recently fourteen small museums of the consortium, Historic Germantown Preserved<\/a>, have focused preservation, research, and programs primarily on colonial, revolutionary, and Victorian history.\u00a0The neighborhood\u2019s efforts at historic preservation can be seen as one continual Colonial Revival.\u00a0Over the last decade, however, institutions founded upon one facet of interpretation are changing to incorporate new research and perspectives, extending the reach of historic interpretation while burrowing deeper to understand what Germantown was really like, in ways that speak to its current residents.<\/p>\n The first example of a historic house that changed its interpretation occurred at the Johnson House<\/a>, a 1768 German-Dutch house that had been damaged in the 1777 Battle of Germantown. In the 1980s scholars discovered the house was a \u201cstation\u201d on the Underground Railroad.\u00a0While rumors had circulated for years that the Johnsons, a family of abolitionists, had helped freedom seekers hide on the family\u2019s large property, strands of research into African American history and new social history coincided to establish that, in the 1850s, the house had served as a \u201cstation.\u201d Neighborhood activists along with the museum community formed a board of directors to preserve the house and interpret it not for its period of construction, but for its significance as a site where the principles of the 1688 Germantown Protest Against Slavery were acted upon.\u00a0In 1997 Johnson House was declared a National Historic Landmark for its role in the struggle for freedom.<\/p>\n In its centennial year, 2000, the Germantown Historical Society began initiatives to enhance its twentieth-century collections through a variety of ways.\u00a0One has been the collection of oral histories of immigrant and in-migrant communities, particularly those of Italian Americans and African Americans.\u00a0These stories reflect the experiences of people who moved to German Township and resulted in a collection that shows residents\u2019 initiatives to end housing discrimination in the Mt. Airy section of German Township and to integrate through active initiatives by neighborhood associations.\u00a0The projects resulted in a richer sense of diversity throughout the recent past, including ways of life in the pockets of Germantown which were frequently isolated from one another by prejudice or segregation.<\/p>\n Many institutions in Germantown have important histories.\u00a0Church histories alone account for hundreds of community histories that profile the tapestry of diverse communities, from founding groups like Mennonites to newer, growing congregations in the Muslim community.\u00a0Schools have also reflected the ways the neighborhood responded to newcomers.\u00a0A research study of Germantown High School<\/a> indicates its evolution over the course of the twentieth century reflected the demographic shifts, specifically charting neighborhood and ethnic backgrounds of students throughout the century.\u00a0It puts into sharp relief how Germantown\u2019s civil rights protests in the 1960s took shape with students calling for reforms about what kinds of history they were being taught.<\/p>\n The recently closed YWCA, long a leading institution since its inception in 1917, has sparked research into its influence, particularly efforts to foster inter-racial programs for young people and to coordinate efforts between its white and Black branches. The YWCA was instrumental in creating collaboration among institutions in the star-studded \u201cNegro Achievement Week\u201d in 1928. This event, a forerunner of Black History Month, brought artistic and cultural leaders from the African American community to Germantown at a time of great racial volatility due to a large presence of the Ku Klux Klan. Such events are now being explored in the traditional historical community in ways that expand the memory infrastructure to include examination of the lives of all Germantown\u2019s residents.<\/p>\n Cliveden<\/a> is the largest house museum in Historic Germantown.\u00a0Built by the Chew family in 1767, Cliveden opened to the public in 1972 and has been interpreted for its role in the 1777 battle, along with its treasured colonial furnishings and decorative arts.\u00a0The Chew family\u2019s wealth was based in large part on the fact that the family was among the largest, and latest, owners of enslaved Africans in Pennsylvania.\u00a0The voluminous Chew Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania<\/a> have recently proved a wealth of information about specific individuals among the Chews\u2019 enslaved Africans, the workings of plantations throughout the mid-Atlantic region, and the climate of violence necessary to manage plantation life.\u00a0Research indicates active agency and manipulation of the system, as well as escapes, by enslaved people as early as the 1770s and 1780s, much earlier than most Underground Railroad accounts.\u00a0Cliveden\u2019s ability to tell the larger, more complex story of the struggle for freedom and independence, rather than just the site\u2019s connections to the Revolution, greatly expands and deepens the sense of what Cliveden means to the neighborhood and the Philadelphia region and points to the major reorientation underway at Trust sites regarding interpreting \u201ctroubled pasts\u201d and integrating the stories of slaves and servants into new narratives.<\/p>\n![\"Photograph](\"https:\/\/philadelphiaencyclopedia.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/Johnson-House-300x208.jpg\")
History of Inter-Racial Programs<\/h3>\n