Brandywine Stories: Giving the Past a Future

At Thanksgiving, we think about what we’re grateful for and what we can give back. And in Chester County, giving back can mean spending a Saturday leading battlefield tours, scanning and labeling old photographs, taking students through Coatesville to uncover the history in buildings they pass every day, or helping plan events, care for historic sites and keep records in order.

After a year spent marking America250, it’s a good time to notice the people who make all that history visible in the first place. History doesn’t just stick around on its own. It stays with us because people keep showing up for it.

Giving Time

Jim Christ has given a lot of himself to history. In 2012, he joined the Paoli Battlefield Preservation Fund, becoming its president in 2018. Christ estimates that he devotes about 10 hours a week to the organization, while also volunteering with six other history groups and maintaining his day job.

The Battlefield Preservation Fund has no paid staff. Volunteers organize programs, give tours, research history, raise money and handle everything from event setup to budgets.

Christ’s favorite moments come when visitors realize important history happened here, in their own backyard. “The best ones are obviously the kids,” Christ said. “You need another generation to come on.”

Giving Knowledge

That next generation is exactly what Coatesville teacher Joe Tassoni is working on.

Tassoni, Coatesville Area School District Social Studies Department Head and the AP History and Government high school teacher, is beginning his 19th year teaching in Coatesville. His Historical Research and Preservation students visit local landmarks, tour the steel mill and walk through the city learning the stories behind places they pass every day.

“You can see the lightbulbs go off,” he said. For Tassoni, teaching history is itself an act of preservation. A building or artifact needs context before people understand why it matters or why they should save it.

Former student Gloria Kasitz is evidence that the approach works. She took Tassoni’s course for three years and competed in National History Day. Learning about Coatesville’s steel mill, former hospitals and other familiar places changed how she saw her hometown.

“I really found a new beauty after learning so much about the past,” she said.

Now headed to Temple University to study film and media arts, Kasitz hopes to combine her interests in history and media, another way of carrying those stories forward.

Giving Access

At Historic Yellow Springs, volunteer Ellen Gelches spends hours doing work most visitors never see: cataloging, scanning and digitizing archival materials so people can find and use them.

A retired metadata librarian, Gelches began volunteering after retirement, but her connection to Yellow Springs reaches much further back. Her grandmother, Kathryn Kern, happily attended the village’s Civil War Orphans School in the late 1800s and returned to visit throughout her life.

While conducting her volunteer collections care, Gelches discovered something unexpected in the archives: a detailed letter her own mother had written to Historic Yellow Springs in 1987. Decades later, the archive gave some family history back to her.

Cataloging can take an hour for a single item and several hours for a folder, Gelches said. And she does it for people she may never know.

“I certainly hope that future generations benefit,” she said. “That’s why I’m doing it.”

The work gives something back to her, too. Gelches uses a phrase she learned from her father, a writer and teacher: “psychic income.” That’s the personal reward that comes from doing something worthwhile. For her, it’s the pleasure of volunteering and seeing visitors connect with a story or place in a new way.

Giving Memory

At the Chester County History Center, Director of Collections/Curator Ellen Endslow sees another kind of giving. About 95% of the items in the museum’s collection have been donated by descendants of their original owners.

Endslow encourages families to identify and date photographs, record oral histories and document ordinary experiences. What seems commonplace today may fill an important historical gap tomorrow.

That’s how Chester County’s history survives: people decide that a place, a story, a photograph or an object matters, then give their time and care to make sure it’s not lost. What they preserve becomes something the we, and the generations after us, get to inherit.

Give Some Time to History

You don’t need a history degree to help preserve local history. Museums, battlefields and historical organizations need volunteers to give tours, welcome visitors, help with events, tend grounds, scan collections, work with school groups and tackle behind-the-scenes jobs.

Start with a site or story you care about, contact the organization and ask what help is needed. Historic Yellow Springs volunteer Ellen Gelches says the work can meet your level of experience and grow with you.

Volunteer opportunities are widely available in our area. Options include the Paoli Battlefield Preservation Fund, Sanderson Museum, Paoli Memorial Association and Brandywine Battlefield’s 250th anniversary reenactment in September 2027.

Kim Andrews is part of the Chester County Community Foundation’s America 250 initiative and a nonprofit governance consultant. She wrote this article to raise awareness of Chester County’s role in our nation’s fight for freedom and commemorate 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. For more information and to get involved, America250ChesCo.org; CCCF250.org.