I Love This Place: Fordyce

The village of Fordyce is easy to miss – it sits on a straight stretch of Garards Fort Road, surrounded by grassy bottomland and 7000 reforested acres of State Game Land 223. Step on the gas and you’ll miss it.

What catches the eye if you’re just cruising through is the brick one-room Fordyce School, now headquarters of the Warrior Trail Association.  Beside it is another blast from the past – a general store that sat vacant for years. It’s open now as The Dutch House at the corner of the crossroads leading to Jefferson to the east and Kirby to the west, if you’re up for a back roads ramble. But if you have the time to see America as it used to be, Fordyce is a good place to pull over, get out and meet the neighbors. They know what’s been going on around here for the last 200 some years.

 “See?” Kathy Morris Miller placed the old photograph on her dining room table and pointed to a smudge of gray beside a cleared field that is now game land. “That was the Moredock farm. The cemetery is there above it. You can hardly see it now but I could take you up if you have time.”

The Morris family Bicentennial Farm was honored in 2007 for being owned and operated by the same family for more than 200 years. Kathy shows me the fragile original deed dated 1786 she found tucked away in a family bible that got her started on her genealogical quest. The farm’s 240 remaining acres that once supported a dairy business are now leased for cattle and hay. The stately farmhouse built in 1875 has been restored and is filled with family artifacts, photographs, and lifetimes of family lore. We spend the afternoon leafing through what Kathy has researched, assembled and is happy to share.

When Kathy testified before the Public Utility Commission about proposed plans to put a high voltage electrical tower grid through Fordyce in 2007, she added historical preservation to the concerns of property devaluation and health issues, Seven generations of patriots lived here, she pointed out. Three times great grandfather Jonathan Morris and his brother George came in the 1770s and helped build Garard’s Fort to protect first settlers, then stayed to serve the Revolution as frontier rangers. The Morris farm had just been awarded Bicentennial Farm status by the Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture and the proposed lines “hissing with deadly voltage and maintained with deadly herbicides” would cut through the farm and pass within a few hundred yards of the house and barn. 

Her words and the impassioned testimony of others helped win the day for six family farms and the historic integrity of Fordyce.

The Caldwells Atlas of 1876 has an insert map of the village that grew up around “Moredock’s X Roads” and a good eye can spot the post office, general store, school and church. One dot represents a shoe shop, another, by the church, shows where George Elms once had a blacksmith shop. 

Kathy points on the Caldwell Atlas map at two log cabins, both long gone, on either side of the original Morris deed. Morris families lived in them until one brother sold his share and great grandfather Jonathan built the present farmhouse for his wife Charlotte and their ten children.

Farming isn’t the only business in Fordyce these days, Kathy tells me. Her next-door neighbors the Zalars have a bus company and just built a new home.

The future is coming at its own pace, one day and one season at a time. By summer, Warrior Trail members will hopefully be having potluck dinner meetings again and out-of-towners will be taking the Kirby exit on Interstate 79 to shop The Dutch House. And in a few years, who knows what sustainable crops will be growing or grazing on these old family farms? 

Slow down, stop by and see for yourself.