Since 1736
Live! Work! Play!
Do it all in Newberry Twp. Today!
Newberry Township is a growing residential community situated between Harrisburg and York. Because of this prime location, there is easy access to enjoy all the cultural events offered by both cities with very little travel while living in a suburban area to the city environment. Newberry Township provides a variety of housing opportunities for all income levels. These opportunities include townhouses, single-family attached and detached homes, mobile homes, and apartments. According to the 2020 Census, the population of the Township was 15,675. The total area of the Township is 30.7 square miles, 30.4 of which island and .3 is water.
The First Settlers
Before the coming of the first settlers in 1736, Newberry Township was inhabited by Susquehannock Indians. Settlers used the Middletown Ferry to access the west bank of the River and reached Newberry Township, settling throughout the Fishing Creek Valley. Newberry Township was officially laid out by the authority of the court of Lancaster County in 1742, previous to the erection of York County. It then included nearly all of Fairview Township and the eastern third of Conewago. In 1783, when its boundaries were still unchanged, it contained 33,107 acres of assessed land, had 15 grist and sawmills, and 296 dwelling houses - three more than the town of York then and more than any other township in the county. The population at this period was 1,704, a large proportion of whom were English Quakers.
Growing Residential Community
Newberry Township is a growing residential community situated between Harrisburg and York. Because of this prime location, there is easy access to enjoy all the cultural events offered by both cities with very little travel while living in a suburban area to the city environment. Newberry Township provides a variety of housing opportunities for all income levels. These opportunities include townhouses, single-family attached and detached homes, mobile homes, and apartments. According to the 2020 Census, the population of the Township was 15,675. The total area of the Township is 30.7 square miles, 30.4 of which is land, and .3 is water.
Did you know?!
We know that Newberry got it's name from the Newberry Friends (a Quaker congregation) that first started meeting here in 1745.
We always get asked "where did they get the name Newberry?", and it appears that Dominish Miller finally found the answer:
Information taken from-
History of York County Pennsylvania (Volume I)
George R Prowell
In the year 1722, Sir William Keith, then
lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania, laid of the first tract of land, west of the Susquehanna. It was situated along the river, above Wrightsville. He called this tract, "Newberry" and that is the origin of the name of this township. The Quaker meeting records of Chester County state that the first Friends to settle west of the river located at a place called "Newberry." This record was made in the year' 1734, and in 1738 these Quakers petitioned for a meeting for religious worship at the present site of Newberrytown.
The settlement of the northern part of
the county by the Quakers began at the
same time that the Germans commenced to take up the lands in the valley of the Codorus, between the present sites of Hanover, York and Wrightsville.
There were no township boundaries laid
out during the first eight years that white settlers occupied the region north of the Conewago. In 1742, about one hundred settlers west of the river and north of the Conewago Creek, petitioned the courts at Lancaster for the erection of a township.
Their petition was granted and during that year the township of Newberry was laid out from a survey made by Thomas Cookson, one of the deputy surveyors for the Province of Pennsylvania.
Newberrytown was laid out by Cornelius Garretson, in the year 1791. It is situated near the centre of Newberry Township, on a ridge of trap formation nearly two miles in width, and extending from a point north of Lewisberry to York Haven. On many parts of this ridge are
huge boulders of dolerite. A survey was
made and forty-three lots laid out by the
founder of Newberrytown.