You’ve seen them in gift shops, museum book stores and maybe you have one of them in your house: an aerial view of your hometown a generation before airplanes existed. The story behind these maps is fascinating, and the work of three researchers reveals secrets left behind nearly 100 years ago.

A handful of artists walked the American countryside drawing nearly 1,800 maps over a three-generation period that showed life in small towns and big cities from the Civil War until the early 1920s. Some of the maps are staggering in detail. Thaddeus M. Fowler, the most prolific artist of panoramic or birds’ eye view maps, spent four years drawing a highly detailed map of Allentown, Pa., right before his death in 1922. Fowler died at the age of 80 from complications caused by a broken leg; he was hurt while walking and drawing around Middletown, N.Y., in his 54th year as a map artist.

The first church in modern Perkasie was demolished about 100 years ago, but parts of the historic South Perkasie building could still be with us today.

If you drive up Main Street in South Perkasie just north of the The Perk, you’ll see a cemetery at the corner of East Market Street and Main. The cemetery is still used and it contains the some of the older gravesites in the Borough. That’s because a small church sat on the property from 1866 until 1917. The Bridgetown Evangelical Church predated Saint Andrew’s Union Church in South Perkasie by about a year.

Two decades later, bigger churches were built in the center of Perkasie in the 1880s. But the Evangelical Church played an important role in community life until its owner, the Evangelical Association, closed its doors and sold it for $106 at a public auction in April 1916.

How could the original meeting house for an important local religious group be closed and scrapped within 40 years? Part of the answer is related to church politics, and another has to do with economics.

That’s a good question. The Borough’s unofficial slogan came from a 1942 book about Bucks County place names. Whether the Lenape actually used those words to describe the area is up for debate.

Penn’s Treaty with the Lenape

The first reference to the “village” of Perkasie goes back to the time of James Logan, the personal secretary to the Penn family. Logan and a Lenape chief recalled in the 1730s a meeting in 1683 at the “Indian Village of Perkasie” between William Penn and Tamanend, the famous Lenape leader.

Penn acquired the lands that make up modern Perkasie, Sellersville, Hilltown and Rockhill in 1683 when he met Tamanend and other Indian leaders about six months after Lenape leaders and Penn held a conference at Shackamaxon, in present-day Philadelphia. Their first land negotiation occurred at an Indian village called Perkasie, which in contemporary times was said to be about 25 miles– a two-day’s journey by horse, from Philadelphia.