Upper Dublin: The Making of a 21st Century Suburb ← All Chapters

Introduction

The following is an effort to put into one place significant developments in Upper Dublin Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania as it has developed into a modern suburb. It will attempt through citation of public sources, such as official records, books, the Internet and newspapers, to chronicle the suburban transformation of one part of the landscape and culture of 20th and early 21st century America.1

Upper Dublin represents the transformation of a colonial settlement established under William Penn’s tutelage, named with Dublin (rapidly renamed Abington) and Lower Dublin (now part of Northeast Philadelphia) in the 17th century, with only several hundred residents when the United States’ first censuses were conducted in 1790 and 1800, later a suburban American government serving 5,000 residents in the 1940s with an annual budget of $20,000, with its governmental components having a combined annual combined budget of $180 million. Some things are unchanged: the township has only one county road (Butler Pike), and a handful of State highways [the Fort Washington Expressway (now known as Route 309), Bethlehem Pike, Dreshertown Rd., Fitzwatertown Rd. (south of Limekiln Pike), Limekiln Pike, Morris Rd., Norristown Rd., Pennsylvania Avenue [portions of which were once called Township Line], Tennis Avenue and Welsh Road]. Upper Dublin Township website, Roadways. But, as described below, much has changed through the decades.

Upper Dublin’s development was also fostered by the 19th century rail system with Philadelphia’s Reading and Penn Central lines designed for the landed gentry to visit their extensive estate properties and to serve farms and industry located outside of Philadelphia (and beyond). In the earliest years, it was simply a village of about 300 inhabitants is 15 miles from Philadelphia and 13 from Norristown” with a post office next to a railroad line. W. Harry Body, Boyd’s Business Directory and Gazetteer of the principal towns of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and Branches, at p. 98 (1883) (available on Internet Archive): In describing Ambler: “A station on the North Penna. Division of the P. & R.R.R. (the post office being called Upper Dublin.”

After various railroad bankruptcies in the 20th century, the railroad mostly became a publicly operated transit commuter rail system with four stations serving Upper Dublin passengers-but none of them in Upper Dublin itself. Later, the post-World War II highway expansion of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to connect the Valley Forge area with New Jersey and New York City, then the center of American life) and construction of the Fort Washington Expressway made Philadelphia’s northern suburbs interconnected with expanding suburban centers throughout the region.

It also can fairly be said that Upper Dublin is not well recognized by many outsiders because, perhaps unlike most of its neighboring municipalities, it has no zip code containing its name. In the 19th century there was an Upper Dublin, but in 1883, perhaps as a result of Ambler Borough then being carved out of Upper Dublin through de-annexation proceedings, the post office on Bethlehem Pike between Euclid and Mattison [as depicted in Dr. Mary P. H. Hough, Early History of Ambler 1682-1888 (1936)], was then renamed Ambler. Ambler Dedicates Federal Building, The Reporter, Oct. 31, 1938, p. 1. Consequently, today Upper Dublin’s zip codes are named Abington, Ambler, Dresher, Fort Washington, Glenside, Maple Glen, Oreland, Willow Grove (with the former Jarrettown and Three Tuns post offices closed), with no reference to Upper Dublin (perhaps to prevent confusion with mailings in 1883 and before), thereby shrouding its municipal existence. So far as this author can ascertain, no similar-sized municipality in Pennsylvania (and perhaps in the country) has assigned as many different zip codes as Upper Dublin (Abington Township has one fewer).

Despite that confusion (and maybe because of it), this history will examine the impact of Upper Dublin’s hundreds of elected public officials, unpaid appointed citizen board and commission members and volunteers, the thousands of governmental personnel who have served the township and district, 100,000-plus homeowners and renters and other residents, the owners and employees of the hundreds of businesses and dozens of commercial developers that have invested more than a billion dollars in construction of homes, offices and shopping centers, and the 100,000 or so graduates of its various public and private schools since the Township’s emergence as modern suburbia.

Its local government has transformed a semi-rural township without its own school district maintaining and less than fifty streets (and a handful of street lights and traffic signals) into a complex of governmental entities to now serving nearly 30,000 residents on hundreds of streets [and two dozen cul de sacs, a term not used in the United States until the 1920s], about two thousand street lights,2 close to a hundred traffic light controlled intersections and innumerable stop signs and two superhighways.3 During this transformation, the Board of Commissioners and the School Board (with the high school first created in the early 1950s), as detailed in the Appendix, it has utilized long- and short-term term financing with almost one hundred bond issues, filed or defended over one hundred lawsuits in both federal and state courts, participated in more than a dozen administrative proceedings in state and federal tribunals, confronted hundreds of large and small land development issues, including a seemingly endless commercial property assessment appeals, all with decades-long impact upon both the township’s residents and the Philadelphia metropolitan area.4

Upper Dublin’s evolution into a modern American suburb would not have occurred without the efforts of residents who devoted untold hours of their lives, many entirely unpaid, to provide devoted governmental and nongovernmental service, both in elective and appointed capacities, to the township. This evolution involved more than two hundred or so members the Township’s various boards and commissions, and the Upper Dublin School District’s members and staff, its PTOs, many advisory bodies, the Fire Company, the two ambulance companies serving the township, and a wide variety of other volunteer activities that have given the community its well-deserved reputation as an excellent suburb in 21st century America albeit with occasional controversies, disputes and missteps.

As will be seen below, modern Upper Dublin has benefited from longevity and quality of its governmental leadership. With due respect for the countless hours devoted hundreds of those who have served in elective and appointed offices, and the multitude of volunteers in a wide variety of community groups, several stand out.

Notes

  1. 1.For those interested in academic studies of the development of the modern American suburb, studies such as those by Robert Lang, Jennifer LeFurgy & Arthur C. Nelson, The Six Suburban Eras of the United States, Research Note, 2 Opolis, No. 1, pp. 65-72 (2006); Kevin M. Kruse & Thomas Sugrue, eds., The New Suburban History (Historical Studies of Urban America), Univ. of Chicago Press (July 2006); and Becky Nicolaides, Suburbanization in the United States after 1945, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.64 (April 26, 2017), provide excellent primers and ample citation of scholarly works on this subject. Development of the modern American suburb may be attributed to a variety of causes: a) aging housing stock in major cities, b) the G.I. Bill, making post-World War II Federal financing available to millions of veterans to enable them to buy homes with lower-cost financing, c) disintegration of small, less inefficient farms at a time when expensive machinery made larger farms more economical while federal taxation and development policies favored suburbanization, (Rigoberto A. Lopez, Adesoji O. Adelaja and Margaret S. Andres, The Effects of Suburbanization on Agriculture, 70 American Journal of Agricultural Economics, No. 2, p. 346, May 1988) (focusing its highly academic analysis on suburbanization of New Jersey), d) university education, with the help of the G.I. Bill, becoming more attainable to those who were born in the Depression, providing more access to middle class lifestyles that were highlighted in newer and existing suburban communities, e) gradual collapse of enforceability of restrictive covenants that barred home sales to Jews and Blacks (as discussed below), f) the compartmentalized housing construction methods attributed to the Levitt brothers in the “Levittown” era, Nitin Nohria, Anthony Mara & Mark Benson, William Levitt, Levittown and the Creation of American Suburbs, Harvard Business School Case 406-062 (Dec. 2005, revised March 2010), and Brian Patton, Why Levittown Didn’t Revolutionize Homebuilding, Construction Physics, July 25, 2024 (discussing how homebuilding economics changed in the 1970s); g) development of central or “wall-to-wall” home air conditioning, first introduced in a Texas subdivision in 1954 (Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Better Than Weather: The Austin Air-Conditioned Village, Cabinet (Summer 2001); How One Austin neighborhood paved the way for a culture of central air conditioning, Texas Standard, June 6, 2024), and, in a more mundane innovation, h) the nail gun’s development in 1951, making carpentry in home construction cheaper and more efficient, Ryan Gueningsman, The Nail Gun Is Born, Journal of Light Construction (jlc.com) at p. 1 (June 2006). (discussing how homebuilding economics changed in the 1970s).
  2. 2.Per the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission program that converted street lighting in Upper Dublin from fluorescent to LED. DVRPC, Regional Streetlight streetlights in Upper Dublin); Justin Heinze, Upper Dublin Among Communities Upgrading to LED Strategies, PATCH, April 26, 2017.Procurement Program (RSLPP), Project Details (listing 2107) Per the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission program that converted street lighting in Upper Dublin); Justin Heinze, Upper Dublin Among Communities Upgrading to LED Strategies, PATCH, April 26, 2017.
  3. 3.As of 2018, Upper Dublin’s public road system within the township had grown to 131 miles, with more than 103 miles (over 78% of the total) maintained by the township, Pennsylvania Dep’t of Transportation, Upper Dublin, First Class Township, Map, Nov. 25, 2017.
  4. 4.Lower Merion Township’s website records the 1960s as the period during which Upper Dublin’s population growth was the highest absolute increase in the county: “Between 1960 and 1970 Lower Merion's 4,050 population increase was only the 12th largest in the county. First was Upper Dublin with an increase of 9,265 followed by Abington with 7,068 and then Upper Merion with 6,647 people. The fourth largest population increase, 6,015, took place in Lower Moreland.” Township of Lower Merion website, Population, text accompanying Figure C-2.