Named for the nearby falls of the Delaware, Fallsington was bypassed by development in the nineteenth century as river travel was channeled to the Delaware Division of the canal and to railroads, and later highways missed the village. In the twentieth century, the core was preserved and restored as a “museum” on the theme of life in an early Quaker village in Bucks County and is now operated by Historic Fallsington, Inc. The earliest buildings are of log, while later buildings are typically of stone with increasingly elaborate wood trim. Across from the Information Center in Gillingham Store (1910, replacing an 1818 store) is the late-eighteenth-century Burges-Lippincott House, which has a remarkable carved wooden doorway and cornice. Its proposed demolition in 1954 was the catalyst for the preservation of the village. The arched window heads of the Stage Coach Tavern, across from the Gillingham store, suggest a pre-Revolutionary date, as well. In the center of the town is a World War I monument, crowned by a doughboy.
Fallsington was the village nearest to William Penn's estate at Pennsbury ( BU16) and was the site of the meetinghouse that Penn attended when he was in residence. Fallsington is now remarkable for having three Quaker meetinghouses within sight of one another from a vantage point atop the potential archaeological remains of a fourth meetinghouse, the seventeenth-century meetinghouse.
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