By DAN SOKIL
Staff Writer
Old maps, churches and homes, trolley tracks from the 1920s, and even a local family who died on the Titanic were the talk of the town Tuesday night.
Their stories were told to a crowd of at least a hundred, from North Wales and elsewhere in the community, as they gathered at the Lansdale Parks and Recreation building Tuesday night.
There, the Lansdale Historical Society’s program “A Portrait of North Wales” was presented by LHS member Steve Moyer.
To begin, Moyer showed maps of the old Indian Trail that we know today as Main Street in North Wales, and traced the development of the borough, which was founded in 1869.
“Originally, the borough was 195 acres, and then we gained another 192.65, but we gave a little over 12 of that back to Upper Gwynedd in 1935,” Moyer said.
The old maps featured a mostly recognizable North Wales landscape, but with some notable differences, like the absence of part of Montgomery Avenue and the presence of trolley tracks that ran down Main Street from 1901 to 1926.
“And like this brochure says, by 1930 North Wales had a few advantages: our citizens are of Welsh descent, so they are ‘naturally enterprising, industrious, social, cultured, and intelligent.’ I guess some things never change,” Moyer said.
The presentation, which will be shown again Thursday night, then featured several yearbook photos from what was then called North Wales High School.
“This is the 1907-1908 seventh grade class, and it came from our member Molly Kavash’s mother’s photograph album,” said Moyer, pointing out Kavash’s mother in one century-old photo of about two dozen students.
“But the interesting thing is, a lot of these people are not in the 1912 photo from the high
school, because a lot of the men would get up through eighth grade and then go off to work,” Moyer said.
The 1912 photo had only one male and seven females, one of them Kavash’s mother.
The next round of photos featured a Who’s Who of North Wales residents, as audience members pointed out their family members in photos.
Moyer unearthed two photos of a North Wales baseball team, featuring a logo with an interlocking “NW” on their uniforms like the New York Yankees’ “NY,” and photos of the old North Wales Elementary School before, and after, the fire there in March 1956.
The next section of photos depicted churches in North Wales, including the 1868 groundbreaking of what is now St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, and photos of Kavash’s parents (and a young Molly) from the 1920s and 1930s.
Dick Shearer, president of the historical society, spoke about James Billiard, the North Wales businessman whose son Austin, born in 1877, died on the Titanic in 1912.
“Austin decided to return to the United States from his wife Maude’s native London. As it turned out, Maude was sick, so he went with his two eldest sons, and they booked spaces on the Titanic,” Shearer said.
“James knew his son was coming across, but indications were that he’d be coming later, and when the ship went down, and the passenger manifest began working its way out to the public, he wired back to London and got ahold of Maude and she confirmed that Austin and the two boys were on that ship,” he said.
Shearer said that Maude lived to be 94 years old and died in 1968. The bodies of Austin and one of his sons were recovered and buried in Flourtown.
The final portion of Moyer’s presentation showed streetscapes of North Wales from over the years, and residents pointed out their homes and shared childhood memories.
If you miss the second showing on Thursday, don’t fret. The presentation was recorded and will be sold as a DVD from the historical society’s Web site, www.LansdaleHistory.org, later this fall.
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