Charles A. Reed was born in 1914 in a first-floor bedroom of a white stone-and-stucco farmhouse on the south side of Tuckerton Road, between Reading Crest Avenue and Stoudt’s Ferry Bridge Road. His father, Ellsworth, had bought the 55 acres in 1910; his mother, Carrie Anna—a Drexel-educated young woman who left a promising city career to raise five boys under tight means—made the place a home. The brothers—Elmer, Charles, Paul, James, and Daniel—came of age during the Great Depression, served overseas or labored on the home front in World War II, and built their adult lives within a few miles of that farmhouse. Charles stayed anchored to the land. From that vantage he watched a rural township evolve into a suburban municipality crisscrossed by highways, lined with warehouses, and thick with housing tracts.
Charles Reed’s mother, Carrie A. Reed, sits with family members in front of the Tuckerton Road homestead. The photo pre-dates the addition of the porch.
When Charles looked out from the porch as a boy, the view was spare and constant: velvet-green hills in summer and straw-brown in winter to the north and east; the Schuylkill’s valley to the west; and southward, the city lights—the courthouse and the Pagoda—punctuating the seasons. The village of Tuckerton nearby was a modest cluster of houses, a church and graveyards, a hotel, and a few shops straddling the railroad that gave the settlement its name and its boundary. Old families—Rothermels, deTurcks, Eblings, Hinnershitzes—stewarded the surrounding acres, with the old church at Pottsville Pike and Tuckerton Road as a spiritual mainstay. Across from it stood the Tuckerton Hotel, operated by Augustus Breidegam from 1905 into the 1930s. Northward, the Pottsville Pike was a jolting two-lane strip: Mahlon Gehris’ butcher shop near the city line (later the Reading Family Restaurant), Walter Senft’s grocery just above the Beltline at George Street, Henry Gass & Sons’ flour and coal yard, and dairies that would be incorporated into Clover Farms located just south of Bellevue Avenue. Dietrich’s Dairy rose on the north side of Bellevue; past the intersection at Reading Crest, Rothermel’s Hotel—later Lesher’s, Whit-Mar, and the Apple Inn—anchored the corner until the building gave way to a Wawa.
Top: Ellsworth and Carrie holding Uncle Jim. Bottom: Charles (left) and Elmer (right).
The Reed place lived in easy conversation with its neighbors. In the 1930s, Sam Reeser and his son Frank ran restaurants. Frank operated the restaurant that for years bore his name. (Later called Wegman’s.) His father operated a similar enterprise at the intersection of Tuckerton Road and the Fifth Street Highway which is now Temple Family Restaurant. Edmund Shearer made willow baskets and farmed; Fred B. Ammarell carried the mail, ran Sunday school, and dispensed local justice. Just north—on the site once occupied by the Saturn of Reading and Bayliss Oldsmobile complex—stood the Hartman farm, held by the same family from the early 19th century into the mid-20th.
Ellsworth Reed
River Road, darker and faster than the pike in those days, carried the Reeds past William H. Luden’s Riverside Golf Course—an 18-holer laid out in 1930 whose clubhouse later became the Muhlenberg Township Recreation Building—and past William C. Bush’s grocery and ice cream stop at the southeast corner of Leisz’s Bridge and River roads. On the high bank above the Schuylkill, summer homes rose for the well-to-do; Luden himself kept one near Eisenbrown Road. The old Riverview Driving Club was remade by Henry Witman and his sisters into the Riverview Night Club—glamorous in the 1920s through the mid-1940s, a stop for big-name acts and the underworld men who chased them—before the property became the Riverview Apartments.
Riverview Driving Club on River Road along the Schuylkill, later a popular nightclub and now an apartment building.
After the war, developer George Hassler began carving the Riverview Park subdivision out of Rothermel land. He kept a butter-yellow colonial on a bluff at Carolina and Magnolia just to the rear of the Reed farm; its laundry room doubled as his tiny, secure mortgage office, where residents queued to pay on time.
Charles Reed
Childhood in Tuckerton revolved as much around schoolhouse chores as lessons. Bodey’s School stood on Stoudt’s Ferry Bridge Road between what would later be Carolina and Floret avenues. Orlando Berger taught eight grades in one room while the pupils fetched water by the pail from nearby wells, fed the pot-bellied stove with firewood or coal, and vied for the nickel that came with a day’s responsibilities. The school still stands as a private residence—a relic of a time when the community’s needs were met locally, and simply. The era’s characters endure in Charles’s recollections: quiet farmers like Charlie Kehr, Wilson Fox of Foxie’s Corner (now the northwest comer of Tuckerton and Stoudt’s Ferry), and Walter Labe; gentle neighbors like Eva Fox at Tuckerton and Reading Crest; and Laura Ketterer with her pony wagon and collies, turning summer afternoons into small parades for local children.
Most indelible was Jacob “Old Jake” Ebling, an eccentric, wealthy recluse who spoke Pennsylvania German and drove a Model T well into the early 1960s. He would pull up the Reeds’ lane, park the old Ford by the white house, and settle into conversation—while the family’s free-range chickens fluttered straight into his back seat to roost, sometimes leaving an egg or two if the visit ran long. Jake showered them with a stream of “Dutchy” epithets, pocketed the breakfast windfall, and, at eighty-five, even asked Charles to follow him in the car for a state-mandated road test. His advice to the trooper—he didn’t drive with one arm around a girl, unlike “these younger fellows”—said as much about the era as it did about Jake’s stubborn thrift. True to form, he wrote his estate to keep the farm in family hands until the youngest heir reached fifty-five. Decades later, part of his old acreage would be a subdivision called King’s View Estates, the price of an unfinished house reaching the hundreds of thousands—proof that even iron-clad wills bend under the gravity of suburban land values.
Charles married Marian, his partner for forty-five years. He worked as a rural mail carrier for forty-seven of them, beginning in 1935 at six dollars a day plus mileage and gas. In those early years, carriers used their own cars; by the late 1970s he had a right-hand-drive postal Jeep—better for reaching roadside boxes across 555 stops on his last route. The Jeep caught fire once near the Exeter golf course; a passerby helped snuff the flames, and Charles finished the day because the mail still had to go through. He kept a city huckster’s route for more than thirty years, selling produce to customers who were mostly kind, occasionally grouchy, always part of the human landscape that fed his stories. He retired from the postal service in 1983. Marian died two days before Thanksgiving 1987; daughters Linda and Donna became his patient audience, bringing grandsons, conversation, and the angel food cakes that paired perfectly with his strong coffee.
Donna Reed
He gave back as a Muhlenberg Township commissioner from 1971 to 1978, a tenure remembered locally for a practical experiment in leaf composting. When the township needed a place to dump bagged autumn leaves, Charles offered his fields—“good mulch,” he said—until loose bags and windy days redistributed the harvest onto neighboring lawns, teaching the hard lesson that even the best ideas need careful execution. Through the 1980s, he still planted sweet corn on a few acres and let nephew Gene farm the rest. Developers came knocking. Charles—the man whose memories ran deeper than any chisel plow—told them to add their names to a list and wait their turn.
Charles Reed
After World War II, the turn came slowly, then all at once. Between 1987 and 2001, the Tuckerton–Stoudt’s Ferry Bridge corridor transformed. Rivers Bend and Heather Knoll filled former cornfields with cul-de-sacs. Warehouses rose where hay once dried. In 1996, a proposal to rezone the Reed farm for up to 800,000 square feet of warehousing drew a packed, heated hearing and a citizens’ campaign; commissioners ultimately rejected the rezoning 3–2. Residential pressure, however, did not abate. In early 2001, with taxes rising and land values surging, the family agreed to sell. Preliminary plans sketched 248 “luxury” apartments along Tuckerton Road and 116 single-family homes on the back lots. Site work for the Reed Farm Singles began in 2002; within a few years, a letter to the editor lamented that where sweet corn had grown “just three years ago,” there were now apartments and houses—and foxes flushed from their old coverts trotting through new backyards.
Reed Farm, 1996 and After
The arc of the farm’s century tells, in miniature, the story of Muhlenberg Township. Rothermel fields became Muhlenberg Park. The old church endured. Clover Farms carried forward the dairy tradition. River Road’s night club turned apartments. The schoolhouse on Stoudt’s Ferry Bridge Road became a private home. Gleaming subdivision signs borrowed the names of men who once parked farm wagons at those corners; Wils Fox’s name marks a street where his corn once waved. The artist Christopher Shearer, who lived a short walk from the Ketterer place and whom young Charles served as a paperboy, traveled Europe to paint but returned to capture the township’s gentler vistas; his protégé Mary Leisz kept him company in a studio that looked out on hedgerows now obscured by warehouses and cluster housing. By the early 2000s, only two sizeable farm parcels remained in Muhlenberg; planners spoke soberly of being “tapped out,” school leaders calibrated additions for rising enrollment, and the township weighed the familiar tradeoffs: a broader tax base on one side of the ledger, the costs of service—and the loss of open land—on the other.
Charles Reed
Charles Reed’s legacy is not an acreage measured in deeds—by the end it could only be measured in memories. It is the Model T idling in the lane while hens commandeer the back seat; the pot-bellied stove glowing in Bodey’s School as younger children carry in the day’s fuel; the postal Jeep’s steering wheel on the “wrong” side, reaching across to a mailbox on the right; a butter-yellow colonial with a laundry room that doubled as a mortgage office; the Pagoda’s red lights blinking through winter trees; and a farmer’s steadiness in the face of change he did not choose yet understood. “If you sell the place where you live, you have to find some other place to live,” he once said. He held on as long as he could, planting a little sweet corn, telling the old stories, and looking across fields that existed first on the land, then in memory. In the end, the Reed farm became part of the township’s next chapter. The measure of the man is that, in telling his chapter well, he helped the community remember how the book began.
Reed Farmhouse, Present Day
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