The Lewis and Hersh years
Through a run of early deaths the estate passed to a five-year-old heiress, then to the Hersh family, who grew it to some 400 acres and gave it a golf course, an octagonal ballroom, and a carriage house that still stands.
The depression of the mid-1830s strained Barnitz’s finances. His daughter Jane had married James Lewis of Philadelphia, and Lewis purchased Springdale; his diary records: “On Monday, 20th of March 1837 we moved to Springdale.” Lewis was the son of Major Eli Lewis, founder of Lewisberry, and brother of Ellis Lewis, later Chief Justice of Pennsylvania.
Margaret Jane, the Lewises’ only child, was born in January 1840. Her mother died six months later; her father four years after that, leaving Springdale to a five-year-old. Raised at Springdale by the Eli Lewis family, she married Samuel Spangler Hersh in 1861. In 1863 she bought the 65-acre Johnson farm to the east, once the summer home of James Smith, York’s signer of the Declaration of Independence, extending the property to what is now Queen Street, and gave birth to Grier Hersh. She died in 1865.
Samuel Hersh added 38 acres in 1868 by purchasing the George Gotwalt farm, where York Hospital now stands. When he died in 1876, Grier, eleven, became sole owner.
Educated at Princeton, Grier Hersh married Julia Mayer in 1887. Under him Springdale was transformed: the house enlarged, a carriage house built around 1888 (the oldest building in today’s historic district), formal gardens, a coachman’s house and a swimming pool added. In 1894 he laid out York County’s first golf course on the estate, nine holes across ground that is now the neighborhood’s streets. Accounts describe carriages arriving for dances in an octagonal ballroom, gardens lit for guests, and croquet by candlelight.