The thousands of tourists and visitors who came to Perkasie in the Victorian Era also flocked to its new amusement facility, Menlo Park. Samuel R. Kramer was just 21 years old when Mahlon S. Sellers hired him to print and edit Sellers’ newly founded newspaper, the Perkasie Central News, in 1881. Kramer had been working as an apprentice and a press operator at the Lansdale Reporter. A year later, Kramer became Henry G. Moyer’s partner in the Central News after Sellers died. A decade later, Kramer started his own venture, Menlo Park, along with other local investors. By then, Kramer was also Perkasie’s justice of the peace.
In 1892, the Menlo Park Association added improvements to a five-acre tract of land on Perkasie’s western edge above and below a hillside; the property included the East Branch of the Perkiomen Creek. The Menlo Park investors leased water rights at the dam that sat on the creek in Sellersville and created Lake Lenape, which allowed pleasure boating and doubled as a winter-time ice-skating area.
