A 1966 photograph of the barn on what was in 1875, the 32 acre farm of the Widow Betsy Rickert, Specktown, Lykens Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania.
The woman in front of the barn has not been identified.
The original house on this farm was said to be built about 1826.
Elizabeth “Betsy” [Yerges] Rickert (1813-1877) was the widow of Martin Rickert (1804-1871). After she died, a public sale was held and the property, then containing about 78 acres, was sold to Hannah [Rickert] Riegle and Harrison Riegle, Betsy’s daughter and son-in-law. After Harrison died in 1899, Hannah sold the property to John Gunderman and she purchased a smaller property just “down the road a piece” from what she had just sold. Hannah raised her younger children on this smaller farm and when she died, it was purchased by her granddaughter, Helen Mae [Hoffman] Dietrich and her husband William E. Dietrich. This latter farm was known as the Riegle-Dietrich homestead and has been featured in several other blog posts.
Near the barn shown above was a pipe that ran from a nearby stream to a trough on the Gunderman property. It supplied more than enough water for all of Specktown, even in the driest of all dry spells. Neighbors would carry containers to this constantly running water to fill and take back to their properties when the wells ran dry.
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Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.