Brumbaugh Homestead

Half a mile southeast of the junction of Township Route 419 with Route 26, at the spillway crest of Raystown Lake, the nomination placed a stone farmhouse that the Brumbaugh family held for about 175 years. When the United States Army Corps of Engineers nominated it to the National Register in 1977 the Corps owned it, and the form listed it under a second name, Timothy Meadows Farm.

The nomination dates the stone section to 1804 and says Jacob Brumbaugh built it, probably with major effort from his son George. Its moldings and chair rails are in plain early Federal style. A brick wing and a vertical plank wing were added before the 1860s, and the family spoke of the "stone house," the "brick house" and the "plank house" as if they were separate houses. The nomination says the brick wing was built by a grandson, also named Jacob, who later recorded an agreement with his son Abraham dividing the house between them.

What sets the house apart is a set of hinged partitions on the first floor. Sections of the board walls could swing back to throw the floor into one large room, and the nomination says the house may have been used for church services. The Brumbaughs were leaders of the German Baptist Brethren, a church that used lay leaders rather than a paid ministry and held services in members' homes. The nomination says George and his son Isaac served in turn as elders and overseers of the James Creek congregation, later the Church of the Brethren, before it built a brick church in 1860 to seat more than 200. Africa's 1883 county history names both men among the early elders of the Brethren there, calls George a minister and a bishop in the church, and says he occupied the homestead until his death on August 6, 1849.

The nomination names Dr. Martin G. Brumbaugh, governor of Pennsylvania and commissioner of education in Puerto Rico, as a member of the family, and says several generations lived in the house at one time up to the 1960s. The property was entered in the National Register on March 28, 1979, for its architecture and as an early settler homestead that doubled as a church.

One panel of the old folding partition, about six feet by six feet, was still visible inside when the form was written, nailed shut and covered for approximately 80 years.

Thus, the Brumbaugh House was both home and church, and the men of the family were both farmers and ministers.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Brumbaugh Homestead (reference 79002236), 79002236, p. 17 · character 18,169 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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