Erie's History and Memorabilia

On June 17, 1837, Strong Vincent was born in his grandfather’s house, the honorable Judge John Vincent, on the northwest corner of East 1st and Cherry Street in the Borough of Waterford. The family moved to Erie in 1843. The judge every year always had the whole family return to his home for Christmas. A special Christmas tradition at his home was that all of the grandchildren would find a hundred dollar bill beneath their plates. According to the Vincent's family journal, the children enjoyed playing hide and seek in the house, because at that time the house extended much farther north and all buildings were connected to the house, wood shed, livery and tack rooms, wood shop and carriage houses, etc. that gave a lot of area’s to hide. The house burned down during the late 1990s. Strong Vincent was a lawyer who became famous as a U.S. Army officer during the fighting on Little Round Top at the American Civil War Battle of Gettysburg, where he was mortally wounded. Vincent ...

Not an actual railroad at all, the Underground Railroad was a series of complex secret routes, churches, institutions and privately owned homes that aided runaway slaves on the dangerous journey north. Pennsylvania, the first free state north of the Mason-Dixon line, provided many entry points to freedom. Upper Canada had banned the importation of new slaves on July 9, 1793, and all slavery throughout the British Empire ended with the Slavery Abolition Act of August 1, 1834. The United States, however, remained bitterly divided. The Underground Railroad was not run by any single organization or person. Rather, it consisted of many individuals — many whites but predominantly black — who knew only of the local efforts to aid fugitives and not of the overall operation. Still, it effectively moved hundreds of slaves northward each year — according to one estimate, the South lost 100,000 slaves between 1810 and 1850. From around 1830, until the end of the Civil War, a...

Built in 1823, the Civil War Recruitment Building, located in the Borough of Waterford, was used as the the recruitment center for the Pennsylvania 83rd regiment, Company E, during the Civil War. The building, though historical in its significance, is not listed on the National Register of Historic Places listings in Erie County. Owned and maintained by a private owner, under the cover of darkness on a Monday morning on Labor Day in 2014 the owner removed and threw away all the architectural wood trim and ornamentation that defined the building’s period, then proceeded to cover the building entirely with vinyl siding, creating a modern facade. During the civil war Waterford was the designated recruitment center for the surrounding area. The recruitment building, located on the east side of High Street, between South Park and East Second Street, was home to the Pennsylvania 83rd regiment, commonly called the 83rd Pennsylvania. The 83rd Pennsylvania was a volunteer infa...

When announcement came that the slave-holding States had inaugurated civil war, the people of Erie County were practically unanimous in the sentiment that the Union must be preserved. Party differences were forgotten, for the time being, and men of all shades of politics were united together in acts of patriotism. The national flag was displayed from hundreds of buildings, and in all the towns and villages vast and enthusiastic meetings were held to declare in favor of sustaining the Government. Amid the general patriotism, none were more earnest and active than the ministers of the Gospel, who, as a class, allowed no opportunity to pass by which they might advance the cause of the Union. The church, as a body, was warmly enlisted on the side of the Government, and did quite as much in its way, as any other instrumentality, in firing the public heart, inducing volunteering and building up a solemn faith in the ultimate triumph of the national army. The first war meeti...

Surrounded by overwhelming numbers of Union Army troops, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his 30,000-troop Army of Northern Virginia in the village of Appomattox Court House. Lee's surrender occurred one day after his army's attempted to retrieve badly needed train supplies at nearby Appomattox Station, where he was thwarted by Union forces commanded by General Ulysses S. Grant. When Lee met Grant at the McLean House to discuss and sign surrender terms and documents on April 9, 1865, elements of the Erie-area 83rd Pennsylvania Regiment were in the vicinity of Appomattox village. Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, but the actual surrender ceremony at Appomattox didn't occur until April 12. A small number of 83rd Regiment troops were present that day at Appomattox. Some elements of the 83rd came forward to Appomattox with supplies. Union Brigadier General Joshua Chamberlain wrote to his sister on April 13, in his letter he mentions the units tha...