Upper Dublin:
The Making of a
21st Century Suburb

About This Book

Upper Dublin Township, tucked into Montgomery County some fifteen miles north of Philadelphia, does not make headlines the way its neighbors sometimes do. And yet, as Jeffrey B. Albert argues in this meticulously researched history, that relative anonymity obscures a rich and consequential story — one that mirrors the broader American experience of suburban transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The township’s arc is striking: a colonial settlement chartered under William Penn’s guidance, with only a few hundred inhabitants at the time of the first federal census in 1790, Upper Dublin spent the next century and a half as a quiet landscape of farms, orchards, Quaker meetinghouses, and small industries threaded together by the Reading Railroad. Then, beginning around 1945, the postwar housing boom arrived, and the township averaged roughly one new residential development per year for the next eight decades — transforming itself from a pastoral community of 5,000 residents operating on a $20,000 annual budget into a full-service modern suburb of over 26,000 people, with a combined governmental budget approaching $180 million.

This book traces that transformation in depth. It chronicles the elected officials and civic leaders who shaped Upper Dublin’s growth, the schools built to serve a swelling population, the political battles over taxation and open space, the flooding crises that tested local government, the residential and commercial developments that reshaped the landscape, and the community organizations that gave the suburb its social texture. Along the way, Albert surfaces some remarkable historical footnotes — including Upper Dublin’s connection to what may be the first civil rights case in American history, George Washington’s encampment at Whitemarsh during the winter of 1777, and the passage of the women’s suffrage “Freedom Bell” through the township on the eve of the 1915 Pennsylvania referendum.

Drawing on official records, local newspapers, oral histories, and public documents, Albert has assembled a comprehensive reference for longtime residents, newcomers, historians, and anyone curious about how one ordinary American suburb became the place it is today.

About the Author

Jeffrey B. Albert has spent much of his life in the communities he writes about. A longtime Upper Dublin Township resident, he served on the township’s Planning Commission, where he developed a close working knowledge of the land-use decisions and governmental processes that shape suburban life. Earlier in his career he served as a township commissioner in neighboring Abington Township during the 1980s, and he has remained an engaged observer of local politics and civic affairs in the region for decades. Now retired, he has channeled that accumulated experience and institutional memory into this history — an effort to document the story of how one ordinary Pennsylvania township became the suburb it is today.