Attached Carriage House

The Carriage House was attached to the main house and can be accessed through the kitchen addition.  It was restored in the 1990s and today houses a collection of early farm tools.

Pierce-Willits Garage

The garage dates to about 1920, and can accommodate two vehicles. It can be seen in the photograph below of the mushroom buildings to the west of the Pierce-Willits house, on the far right behind the vintage automobiles.

Pierce-Willits Main House

This important historic home, Historic Resource #77, is located on Smithbridge Road, near the Rachel Kohl Library and near the American Hero Memorial. The Pierce-Willits House is the headquarters of CTHS and is the site of the Virginia Merion DeNenno History and Education Center. Francis P. Willits, born November 3, 1856, and a graduate of the Maplewood Institute (the site of the new Concord Township Municipal Complex) bought the Pierce home in 1885. It remained in his family until 1975 when it was acquired in 1975 by Concord Township. Frank was one of the early growers of mushrooms in America. He acquired mushroom spores from England and began developing his mushroom business in 1892. His brother-in-law, Jacob F. Styer, incorporated mushroom growing into his already budding nursery business along Route 1. The photograph below shows the mushroom buildings that were located in the area west of the Pierce-Willits house, where the Hero Memorial is now. The existing garage can be seen on the far right of the photo behind the vintage cars, which date this photo to the 1930s or 1940s.

St. John’s Concord

John and Margery Hannum of Concord were baptized in an early Quaker separatist group formed by George Keith who was subsequently ordained in England as an Anglican priest. They donated one acre off the northwest corner of their hundred acre property for St. John’s Church in 1702. A plaque in the middle of what is now the cemetery shows where the first church, a 24′ x 36′ log building, stood. A brick addition was built onto the Log Church in 1769, and the log was replaced by stone in 1790. The present Greet Revival church building was erected in 1844. It is Historic Resource #102 on the Concord Township Historic Resources Inventory, protected under the Historic Preservation Ordinance.