AREA HISTORY:  Paper City, Manchester Township, York County, PA

Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Kathy Francis

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History of York County, Pennsylvania.  John Gibson, Historical Editor.
Chicago: F. A. Battey Publishing Co., 1886.
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A PAPER CITY – Page 614

On part of the original Eib’s Landing property, now owned by Jacob Hartman, 
about the year 1800, a town was laid out, which the founder, from the number of 
streets planned, expected to grow into a prosperous city.  It was laid out as 
the “Town of Manchester.”  Eighty-one lots of this proposed town, 50x200 feet 
each, were advertised to be sold for the direct tax of the United States, at 
Harrisburg, December 3, 1818.  The town was planned at a time when the lumber 
and fishing interests of the Susquehanna led many visionary land owners to 
suppose that their farms were to be the sites of flourishing cities in the near 
future.  The same ideas that characterize many venturesome and deluded people of 
our Western States and Territories, were prevalent in Pennsylvania eighty years 
ago.  Two small houses, long since torn down, and an abutment beginning a 
bridge, is all there ever was to represent the “Old Town of Manchester on the 
Susquehanna.”