Results of the Chesapeake Bay Mapping Initiative in Pennsylvania

A few years ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP), in collaboration with the National Park Service Chesapeake Bay and the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership, launched an ambitious project called the Chesapeake Mapping initiative (CMI). The purpose of the project was to identify and map older and historic places that reflect African American history in the Chesapeake Bay watershed in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia.

The project in Pennsylvania focused on adding new resources in the southcentral counties in the watershed: Adams, Cumberland, Dauphin, Franklin, Lancaster, Lebanon, and York. The National Trust also has summaries of the Maryland and Virginia projects.

Now a credit union, this building on S. Duke St. in Lancaster once housed the Conestoga Elks lodge Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World (IBPOEW). The IBPOEW is an Black fraternal order modeled on the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, a fraternal group then open only to membership among White people.

NTHP hired a team of consultants to develop and execute a crowdsourcing platform and survey to identify places within that 7-county region associated with African American history and culture. The crowdsourcing platform, which used a custom WikiMap, was paired with public meetings to encourage participation and raise awareness about the project. Survey work was completed using Surveyor to add new places to PA-SHARE.

The Chesapeake Mapping Initiative wikimap gave users the opportunity to mark places associated with African American history and add comments. The yellow dots represent added content.

Members of the public contributed over 200 entries to the WikiMap. Knowledgeable local experts contributed their time and expertise to this National Trust project and without their assistance, the project wouldn’t have been able to capture as much information as it did. PA SHPO appreciates their time and contributions.

The International Athletic Club is one of the many places in York identified through NTHP’s crowdsourcing effort. This club was started in 1954 by Black Olympian John Terry, a weight lifter and boxer who competed in the 1936 summer Olympics in Berlin.

Of the 200+ identified locations, the consultant team identified 126 places for additional work: 52 places and six historic districts were surveyed and added as new resources to PA-SHARE, 47 places and six historic districts had existing records in PA-SHARE and these records were updated with this new information, and 15 were identified as potential archaeological sites.

Judytown in Steelton Borough, Dauphin County was one of the six potential historic districts identified through NTHP’s project.

Following is a table of the buildings and historic districts that were surveyed or supplemented from crowdsourced contributions. If you are curious about any of these places and would like to learn more, you can search for them by resource name in PA-SHARE following these steps (more detailed search instructions are available on PHMC’s website):

1. Go to https://share.phmc.pa.gov/pashare/landing. If you already have a PA-SHARE account, sign in. If you don’t, click “Register for an Account” to quickly create a free Basic account from the PA-SHARE landing page. If you don’t want to create a free account, click “Proceed as Guest” and follow the instructions. Please note that Guest and Basic users have limited data views and access to attachments.
2. Once in PA-SHARE, click on “Search” near the upper left corner of your monitor. Search will open the “Quick” search fields by default on the left side of your monitor.
3. Find “Resource Name” about halfway down the list.
4. Copy the resource name from the table below and paste it into the “Resource Name” field.
5. Click Search.
6. All resources that match that that name will appear in the results grid below the map. Select the resource in the grid and click on the GoTo icon to open the resource record.

Note: There may be instances where you’ll see several places listed in the grid with that resource name. If that occurs, scroll down to the end of the grid results and select the place that has the same municipality and county shown in the table below.

Steps for searching PA-SHARE for resources documented through NTHPS’s Chesapeake Mapping Initiative.

Chesapeake Mapping Initiative: Field Surveyed Properties in Pennsylvania