How Newtown lost out to Doylestown as Bucks County government seat
A man named Larry succeeded where others had failed for decades.
Cauffman Hill is pretty high at 820 feet in Nockamixon Township. It’s about as remote as you can get in the far northeast of Bucks County. As a state conservation landscape, the hill protects wildlife and vegetation on 2,000 acres near fabled Ringing Rocks. I guess Lawrence Cauffman would have been thankful had he known the hill would be named for him.
Still, you would think the county courthouse would carry his name. Or at least a local road. Because of him, Doylestown trumped Newtown as the new county seat in 1810. It happened when the village was a crossroads best known for Doyle’s Tavern.
Cauffman’s successful gambit was a tough blow to Newtown just about to build a new courthouse and prison. To understand how this happened, you have to dig back in time to Larry’s early years. He was the son of Joseph Theophilus Cauffman who arrived in Philadelphia from Strasburg, Germany in 1749. A man of means, Theo bought large tracts of land in Philly, Bucks and Montgomery counties. Larry, born in 1769, was 15 when settlers in Upper Bucks were yapping over difficulty in traveling rough roads to reach the county seat in Newtown. Nearly 300 signed petitions urging state government to relocate the courthouse to Doylestown. The region’s most prominent families were represented – Dungan, Greir, Hines, Meredith, Wigton, Harris, Mathews, Stephens, Flack, Shewell, Darrah and Zebulon Pike Sr. of Solebury. The latter was the father of Army Gen. Zebulon Pike, the great Western explorer who discovered and climbed what is today Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
The appeal focused in one ponderous, 73-word sentence: “The great disadvantage of having the Courts of Justice held in a place very uncentral in said county, whereby the expense of attending on juries and other occasions fall very unequally on the freemen of said county, the present Court House and prison are old and decaying, and must soon be rebuilt from the foundation which makes the present a proper time to apply to your Honorable House for leave to build a Court House and prison on a better plan at Doylestown.”
That effort went nowhere. Proponents tried and tried again for 15 years. Still no action.
During that span, Larry worked in the Philadelphia counting room of banker Robert Morris who financed the American Revolution. He met and married Sarah Shewell whose family built Painswick Hall mansion in 1729 in Doylestown. The couple moved in as the 18th century wound down, and Larry became man about town. One biographer described him as “fine looking and likeable in personality who became prominent in social and business circles, enjoying the acquaintance of nearly all the men of note in Bucks County.”
His cause celebre became replacing Newtown as the county seat. He organized a large meeting of supporters in Bedminster on Christmas Day in 1800. That led to others in the region. The unified effort succeeded in stalling construction of the new courthouse and jail in Newtown to consider relocating them to the geographic center of Bucks – Doylestown.
Among those joining the dump Newtown campaign was Rev. Nathaniel Irwin, influential pastor of Neshaminy Presbyterian Church in Warwick. A caricaturist drew a portrait of him on the wall of the old courthouse in Newtown with a rope looped around the building and the other end around his shoulders dragging “as for dear life” the building to Doylestown.
Within a decade, Larry Cauffman’s effort succeeded. The Legislature and the governor approved the switch in February 1810. Three years later the new courthouse and jail opened for business in Doylestown.
The move from Newtown left bitter feelings in Lower Bucks. A strenuous drive began to split the county in two and restore Newtown or Bristol as the government seat of a new county. The campaign almost succeeded. More on that in my next column.
Sources include “Place Names in Bucks County Pennsylvania” by George MacReynolds published in 1942, and “History of Doylestown, Old and New” by W.W.H. Davis published in 1905.
Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com. Signed copies of the second printing of both volumes of his “Bucks County Adventures” series are for sale at bookstores in Doylestown, Newtown and Lahaska.