“In rural Berks townships, the historic buildings cannot be separated from their setting…the whole landscape having a nineteenth-century historic character.”
– Phoebe Hopkins (1987), Executive Director 1991 – 1999
For six years, Berks Nature embarked on a comprehensive survey of Berks County’s historic and rural landscape, establishing a county-wide register of historic sites and sparking widespread interest in historic preservation.
Finding no county-wide historic preservation program, Berks Nature rose to meet this community need, taking responsibility for identifying historic sites, nominating structures and even municipalities for the National Register of Historic Places, and other preservation initiatives.
One of the plaques awarded through Berks Nature’s Historic Sites Plaque Program.
One such initiative was the Historic Sites Plaque Program.
After completing the historic sites survey, Berks Nature offered plaques to qualifying buildings that both recognized the historic character of the structure and acknowledged the passionate people shepherding these cherished pieces of Berks County’s heritage.
Criteria for attaining a Historic Sites Plaque emphasized architectural merit and integrity, but were intentionally more lenient than the stringent standards of the National Register of Historic Sites in order to recognize the many structures – an estimated 250 sites – that have played an influential role in shaping Berks County.
The plaques also called public attention to the many cultural resources that freckle the bucolic communities of Berks County.
Ultimately, the call of nature took precedence and by 2010 Berks Nature had transferred their records of the historic sites surveys and local nominations to the National Register to the Berks History Center.
With a public library of historic documents and expertise in historical archives, the Berks History Center was better suited to provide proper, long-term care for these records, giving Berks Nature the space to turn their full attention to Berks County’s natural and open spaces.