Bucks County, Pennsylvania

Bucks County is a county located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As of the 2010 census, the population was 625,249, making it the fourth-most populous county in Pennsylvania and the 98th-most populous county in the United States. The county seat is Doylestown. The county is named after the English county of Buckinghamshire.

Bucks County is included in the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD Metropolitan Statistical Area, more commonly known as the Delaware Valley. It is located immediately northeast of Philadelphia and forms part of the southern tip of the eastern state border.

History

Founding

Bucks County is one of the three original counties created by colonial proprietor William Penn in 1682. Penn named the county after Buckinghamshire, the county where he lived in England. Penn built a country estate called Pennsbury Manor in Falls Township, Bucks County.

Some places in Bucks County were named after locations in Buckinghamshire, including Buckingham Township, named after the county town of Buckinghamshire; Chalfont, named after Chalfont St Giles, the parish home of William Penn's first wife and the location of the Jordans Quaker Meeting House, where Penn is buried; Solebury Township, named after Soulbury, England; and Wycombe, named after the town of High Wycombe.

Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania ⁱ/ˌpɛnsᵻlˈveɪnjə/ (Pennsylvania German: Pennsilfaani), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state located in the northern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The Appalachian Mountains run through its middle. The state borders Delaware to the southeast, Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, Lake Erie and the Canadian province of Ontario to the northwest, New York to the north, and New Jersey to the east.

Pennsylvania is the 33rd largest, the 6th most populous, and the 9th most densely populated of the 50 United States. The state's five most populous cities are Philadelphia (1,560,297), Pittsburgh (305,801), Allentown (118,577), Erie (100,671), and Reading (89,893). The state capital is Harrisburg. Pennsylvania has 51 miles (82 km) of coastline along Lake Erie and 57 miles (92 km) of shoreline along the Delaware Estuary.

The state is one of the 13 original founding states of the United States; it was originally founded in 1681 as a result of a royal land grant to William Penn, the son of the state's namesake. It was the second state to ratify the United States Constitution, on December 12, 1787. Independence Hall, where the United States Declaration of Independence and United States Constitution were drafted, is located in the state's largest city of Philadelphia. During the American Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in the south central region of the state.

County

A county, abbreviated Cnty. (US) or Co. (UK and Ireland), is a geographical region of a country used for administrative or other purposes, in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French conté or cunté denoting a jurisdiction under the sovereignty of a count (earl) or a viscount. The modern French is comté, and its equivalents in other languages are contea, contado, comtat, condado, Grafschaft, graafschap, Gau, etc. (cf. conte, comte, conde, Graf).

When the Normans conquered England, they brought the term with them. The Saxons had already established the districts that became the historic counties of England, calling them shires (many county names derive from the name of the county town with the word "shire" added on: for example, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire). The Vikings introduced the term earl (from Old Norse, jarl) to the British Isles. Thus, "earl" and "earldom" were taken as equivalent to the continental use of "count" and "county". So the later-imported term became a synonym for the native English word scir ([ʃiːr]) or, in Modern English, shire. Since a shire was an administrative division of the kingdom, the term "county" evolved to designate an administrative division of national government in most modern uses.

Ringing rocks

Ringing rocks are rocks that have the property of resonating like a bell when struck, such as the Musical Stones of Skiddaw in the English Lake District as well as the stones in Ringing Rocks Park, in Upper Black Eddy, Bucks County, Pennsylvania USA, the Ringing Rocks of Kiandra, near Cooma, NSW and also the Bell Rock Range of Western Australia. Ringing rocks are also known as sonorous rocks or lithophonic rocks, as used in idiophonic musical instruments called lithophones.

Ringing Rocks Sites in Pennsylvania

Ringing Rocks County Park

Ringing Rocks County Park is a Bucks County park in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania at 40°33′47″N 75°07′37″W / 40.56316°N 75.12689°W / 40.56316; -75.12689. Originally, the land was acquired by the Penn family from the Lenape (Delaware Nation) through the infamous 1737 Walking Purchase. It is not clear who made the original land warrant for the area now covered by the Ringing Rocks County Park. On the 1850 property map of Bucks County, the owner appears to be Tunis Lippincott; however, there is no warrantee listing under that name. The earliest published description of the Bridgeton boulder field is found in Davis 1876. The seven-acre boulder field was purchased in 1895 by Abel B. Haring, president of the Union National Bank in Frenchtown, NJ. Apparently Haring wished to protect the ringing rocks from development, and even refused an offer from a manufacturer of Belgian blocks for the right to quarry the stones. (Humphreys 1905, Sigafoos 1935). On August 22, 1918, the land which contains the Bridgeton boulder field was donated by Haring to the Bucks County Historical Society. The grant included 7 acres 8.08 perches of land. A right-of-way was granted by John O. McEntee for access to the park (Fackenthal 1919). Later the land was transferred to Bucks County and operated as a county park. Additional land acquisitions have increased the size of the park to 128 acres.