Green Park

Green Park. Perry County Bicentennial. , While quiet today, Green Park once bustled with energy. Thanks to abundant clay and sand for brickmaking, reliable water power from Montour Creek and entrepreneurship residents, the area presented an ideal location for early industry., In 1806, farmer John Henry Bernheisel constructed the large brick house north of this location. It was later expanded by his descendants. When he died in 1825, age 60, he left his family 330 acres, the house and a sawmill., Son Jacob (1801-1871), in 1832, sold the mill, the mill race, the tail race and 15 acres along the waterway to his brother Solomon (1808-1889). By 1835, Solomon had built the large brick mill (ahead), which originally processed hulled clover seed, and a separate fulling mill and carding mill., The entire family expressed a spirit of invention. Jacob Bernheisel operated a machine shop and received a patent for a corn sheller, separator and feeder in 1867. His son George (1829-1905) was a machinist and grain cradle maker. By 1860, son Peter (1826-1905) owned an iron foundry, known as P. Bernheisel and Company, immediately to the west of the Green Park School., In the late 1870s, John T. and David Rheem, operating as Rheem and Brothers, purchased the foundry, which manufactured the bell for the Green Park school, and Peter retired to farming., As Perry County's midpoint between the Conococheague Mountain in the west and the Susquehanna River to the east, Green Park proudly claims to be central to early Perry County industrial development., [Captions:] , John Henry Bernheisel house, built 1806. (Photo ca. 1890.), North side of the 1835 brick Bernheisel Mill. The attached wooden sawmill was demolished in the 1990s., Solomon Bernheisel's house, containing a spiral staircase and a brick floor in the attic, was built in the late 1840s., A flour bolt in the mill, patented in 1876 by Solomon Bernheisel and Joseph Young, sifted bran from the flour to produce a lighter-weight product., From 1893 to 1903, a trestle carried the standard-gauge Perry County Railroad over the narrow-gauge Newport and Sherman's Valley Railroad just west of here on the north side of Montour Creek. Sections of the raised rail beds are still visible along the run.