Alexander Schaeffer House and Farm
- Also Known As: Alexander Schaeffer Farm also Sheetz Farm
- Also Known As: Brendle Farms
- Address: 213 Carpenter St
- Vicinity: Jct of PA 501 and 897
- Phone: (717) 949-2244
The The Schaeffer House is among a handful of exceptionally well-preserved early American-German buildings that clearly convey specialized historic usages, and provide significant windows into the lifestyle and impact of German-speaking colonists on the American landscape. The Schaeffer House is quite possibly the only surviving Weinbauernhaus, a type that incorporates domestic functions and spaces used for the production of alcohol within a single building. As such, it is an excellent example of how European traditions were imported to colonial America and adapted to meet American needs and conditions. In Europe, Weinbauern culture was largely centered on wine production; in contrast, its American manifestation focused on distillation and the manufacture of spirits. While the end product was distinct, the functional relationship between the house and commercial activity was identical. The Schaeffer House retains an exceptionally high degree of integrity. Its eighteenth-century, bank house form is entirely discernible and significant features of colonial German architecture abound, including original hardware and painted decoration, the paling, water channel, double distilling fireplace with flue controls, the Liegender Stuhl truss, and the three-room plan with internal fireplace (Flurkuchenhaus). The Schaeffer House is an extraordinary survivor, and provides an unusual and unique Insight into the early history of America. - NRHP, 10 April 2010
Alexander Schaeffer founded the town of Heidelberg, a planned community in which he began selling lots by the early 1760s. Schaeffer was not a new inhabitant of Heidelberg, and his professional and personal interest in the area started at least a decade before he became the official founder of the town. Schaeffer was born January 8, 1712, in Schriessheim, a small village along the Bergstrasse, just south of the capital city of Heidelberg, in the area of Europe then defined as the Rhenish Palatinate. Not much is known about his early life in Germany except that he grew up as part of a large family that worked in an area historically involved with the winegrowing practices of the region. Only a few months before his twenty-seventh birthday, Schaeffer arrived in America through the port of Philadelphia on September 11, 1738, from the ship Robert and Alice. By the mid-1740s, Schaeffer had worked his way from Germantown across southeastern Pennsylvania, and settled, with his wife Anna Engle, on a piece of land just outside of the village of Heidelberg. By 1747, he had received a proprietary patent for land in Lebanon Township and he soon became actively involved in the growing town. In addition to providing a marketplace, public water fountains, and several lots on which to locate cemeteries and churches, he built one of the first and most successful taverns, the King George, by 1752. Soon to be renamed Schaefferstown, Heidelberg was a noted mercantile center which, by the 1790s, boasted several taverns on the town square to cater to the increasing number of businessmen and travers visiting the area. - NRHP, 10 April 2010