National Farm School
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Delaware Valley College (National Farm School)
1896 and later, Magaziner and Eberhard, and Andrew Sauer and others. 700 E. Butler Ave., 2 miles southwest of Doylestown
Just to the west of Doylestown is a small college that memorializes Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf's goal of bringing children of the late-nineteenth-century Jewish immigration into the mainstream of American life. A visit to Russia in 1894 led to a meeting with Count Leo Tolstoy, who advised him to “lead the tens of thousands from your congested cities to your idle, fertile lands.” Using funds raised from lecturing, Krauskopf purchased a 118-acre farm with a historic house and barn near Doylestown as the site for his school and built his first school building in 1896 (Cope and Stewardson, demolished). In 1917, he hired University of Pennsylvania graduate Louis Magaziner as architect for buildings in various historic styles that connected his students to the wider world. The Edward Hirsh Botanical Laboratory is Early Renaissance in style. The later dormitories and the Krauskopf library surrounding an iconic common were designed by Andrew Sauer to recall the New England colonial as celebrated by Wallace Nutting.
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