Published January 6, 2019
| 1 Comment | Leave A ReplyI’ll admit to being a big fan of datestones on buildings.
And I’ll admit further that I’ve found that they must be examined critically just like any other piece of historical evidence – sometimes in ways that I never would have anticipated.
The “default version,” so to say, is that you’ll find a datestone either literally carved in a stone or etched into concrete commemorating the year that a building was constructed along with either the initials or name of the structure’s owner.
A recent edition of the “Heritage Center News” from the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University about markings on buildings at the center added some insights to this.
Last summer’s we season led to the discovery in the basement of the farmhouse on the center’s campus of a faded inscription on the whitewashed masonry walls: “J : B / 1814.”
The center’s tour narrative had long suggested that the house was built between 1810 and 1820. Deed records confirmed that the owner of the property from the late 18th century through 1854 was a Jacob Biehl – and the datestone snugly verified all of the data and gave the house a more firm date.
The barn and summer house at the center has inscribed datestones showing 1855 for both construction, which always made sense to center staff since the Sharadin family had just purchased the property and likely had replaced a log barn with a more substantial one.
But there’s another more formal, stamped datestone on the barn that reads “D&M Sharadin May 24, 1871” that is still puzzling to the center staff. The D and M fit with David and Maria Sharadin, the first owners of the property from that family.
But by 1871, center staff believe the farm had been under the supervision of their son Ephraim Sharadin for some time, so what is the significance of the year attached to David and Maria’s names?
Sometimes datestones are merely painted and can be lost to time in that way.
And they may represent a renovation rather than original construction.
It’s also not impossible for initials, especially those etched rather than more formally inscribed, to be of the actual builder rather than the owner.
One of my favorite datestone stories involved the one at the house of my five-great-grandfather Conrad Beidler, which has what appears to be a backwards D and a B along with the 1783 date.
After understanding that many datestones were painted, it became obvious that the “backwards D” was really a C incorrectly repainted with a vertical line on the right side.
Datestones – what seem like something straightforward can be so much more complicated!
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The Best of "Roots & Branches", Fifth Edition published July 2017, edited by Terri J. Bridgwater.
It contains a selection of columns from Beidler’s award-winning newspaper column (currently published in the Altoona Mirror), which is the only syndicated newspaper column on genealogy in Pennsylvania.
The book can be ordered online, or purchased directly from Jim when he speaks at a conference.
Rick Bender
6 years ago
The Hans Matthias Theiss property has a barn with an 1806 datestone and a nearby stone cabin with a 1744 datestone. People have said the 1744 stone is the date for the stone cabin. However, one person — one who disassembled old buildings — suggested it might have been the datestone for the older log cabin and that it had been incorporated into the stone cabin, which he suspected was built in the 1800s. (He wondered if maybe the datestone had actually been used a foot[?] for a stove in the log cabin, with the so-called anvil shape of the stone suggesting nothing more than such a foot.) The 1806 datestone for the barn seems reasonable and that barn and the stone cabin have a similar look, suggesting to me that they could easily have been built at the same time (1806, for example). But who knows?