You may never have noticed it, but high on the southwest corner of the stone Broad Street Market building is a rather marvelous street sign. Etched into a block of what appears to be white marble, its time-worn lettering reads: “Third Street/Verbeke Street,” as if to put to rest all the brouhaha from the neighborhood back in 1864 about salvaging the original name, Broad Street.
One hundred and fifty years ago in Harrisburg, corner buildings—particularly formidable stone piles such as this—were expected to serve as informational centers, as well as anchors for the block. In some places in the city (the old 8th Ward comes to mind), they were placarded with advertising. For a state capital, one that had yet to pave its streets much less lay stone curbing or replace its creaky wooden sidewalks with brick ones, mounting street directional signs on poles at each intersection was about as unlikely as finding a way to avoid the mud.
Capping off the topmost course of stone after a year of construction had to have been exhilarating for the market construction crew. The West Harrisburg Market House, as it was known in those days, was the crown jewel of everything that William K. Verbeke had worked for since the founding of his “Village of West Harrisburg.”
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In 1856, William and his sister Margaretta were left some real estate on Walnut Street following the death of their father Dr. James C. Verbeke, a prominent city druggist and physician (back in Europe, he had been a surgeon at the Battle of Waterloo). Margaretta, married to Pennsylvania Telegraph Publisher Theophilus Fenn, invested her proceeds into some of what became the borough of Marysville on the West Shore. Verbeke Street there is named for her. William, the older of the two, plowed his inheritance into 30 acres of some of the soggiest, unforgiving-looking, cow-manure infested scrubland in the Harrisburg environs.
Stretching north along the river, the patchwork of smelly farms, marshland and scraggly woods lay legally in Susquehanna Township, although that disorganized body had evidently neither the resources nor the inclination to develop it. Verbeke believed that the state legislature’s approval of Harrisburg’s charter—allowing it to shed its 66-year-old borough form of government for third-class city status—would go hand-in-glove with the annexation of land running northwest to Maclay Street and east to 13th.
Verbeke’s gamble—the land, most of it purchased from farmer Robert Gillmor—lay principally between Charles and Reily streets and Front and Fulton streets. For all intents and purposes, it was a builder’s nightmare. The river district had, since time immemorial (likely the end of the Ice Age), endured regular flooding. According to newspaper accounts, when Verbeke began his development, a large sand dune sat somewhere in the middle of Verbeke Street. He would later put it to good use as mortar for brick.
The plan was basically “build a village and they will come.” With annexation, Verbeke was either sitting on a veritable goldmine or destined to end up back in the family drugstore. Either way, he hoped to prove that West Harrisburg, as it was so quaintly called, was worthy of investment, tax dollars, infrastructure and other amenities. To get his town quickly up and running, Verbeke took a shortcut. He purchased wood frame houses downtown, hauled them up 2nd Street and had them set on new foundations. For antsy developers, perception (in the form of visible occupants) can be everything.
Raised a benevolent, Christian gentleman, Verbeke offered lots to some of the most downtrodden of Harrisburgers. The black community, much of it squatting in shacks behind the old state Capitol where only the luckiest souls worked as charwomen, was already earmarked for removal anticipating site improvements for the 1864 East Wing extension program. As non-homeowners, African Americans couldn’t even expect reasonable compensation.
So, Calder Street from 3rd to Fulton eventually boasted its own “all-colored” schoolhouse, Calder School, at the corner of Marion Street. Joyous over their new neighborhood, residents began calling their little section of town “Verbeketown”—Bill Verbeke may as well have been Abe Lincoln.
Verbeke didn’t seem to care what people called his town just so they called on it. On his plot plan, the main, wide thoroughfare, plainly named Broad Street (although a few wisecrackers began calling it “Broadway”), was an obvious takeoff on the State Street approach to the Capitol as planned by William Maclay. Instead of a government building, there were plans for a pair of market houses so residents wouldn’t have to trudge down to Market Square to buy groceries.
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Papers to incorporate the West Harrisburg Market House Company were drawn up on April 20, 1860. As originally planned, the markets were to be a pair of two-story buildings constructed of river stone at a price not to exceed $10,000. The ground floors were to be used by vendors and the second floors as rental space.
However, the timing could not have been worse, the beginning of four anxious, mostly war-torn, nail-biting years. By the time of the Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter, S.C, on April 12, 1861, the only visible progress made on the market—at least that reported by the newspapers—consisted of an excavation. As it was filling up with rainwater, Verbeke and his primary partners, Jacob and Lewis Haehnlen and Theophilus Fenn, might have been forgiven if they had thrown in the towel.
With the war, Verbeke and his wife Marion (sometimes spelled Marian) busied themselves as volunteers. Sacrificing precious capital that could have been used to build the markethouse, they organized the Marion Verbeke Rifles (evolving eventually into Company F of the 54th Pennsylvania Infantry). Meanwhile, Dr. Verbeke’s old notions store on Walnut Street was converted into a camphouse for soldiers who weathered the winter of 1861-62 there. Marion helped nurse the wounded as mangled men began streaming into town.
In the Sixth Ward, talk of a temporary market facility cropped up in both city papers in early 1863, but came to naught. The Daily Telegraph gamely announced on June 3 that a foundation finally was under construction.
The popular name Broad Street was already becoming ingrained in the general population. However, that summer, Common Council, with Verbeke elected to it (and installed on the newly formed Street Committee), voted to officially rename it Verbeke Street. One wonders how the purportedly self-effacing developer voted, having already named William Street after himself and Marion Street for his wife. But proposals to change the name back to Broad Street would not go away.
As a 10-year-old in 1920, my mother, who lived at 260 Verbeke and spent some of her formative years attending Verbeke Street Elementary School across the street, vividly remembered holding hands with her sisters on their way to visit the Broad Street Theatre, now the site of the Midtown Scholar Bookstore, to see films in the days before talking pictures. Ethel Janes Frew, to her dying day—even though she begrudgingly acknowledged that it was the “Verbeke Street School”—clung stubbornly to “Broad Street” and all that the name implied.
Although the Aug. 8, 1863 edition of the Telegraph reported the foundation as finished and stonemasons raising the walls, the force employed was small. Charles S. Swartz, a State Street plasterer and a one-share holder in the market who was hired to supervise construction, hoped to have the first building ready by October or November but, with the war on, well, good tradesmen were always hard to find and now harder to rehire, with many missing arms and legs. One mason, reported the paper in a later edition, while dressing one of the stones and chipping off a block, was startled to discover a large, petrified rattlesnake inside.
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Work ground to a halt for the winter and did not recommence until the following spring. The winter of 1863-64, a bitterly cold one in Harrisburg according to reports, saw the roofless and windowless market building become a sleeping place for homeless people trying to get out of the wind. Verbeke eventually turned it over to the “Invalid Corps” for wounded soldiers. Construction ratcheted up again in the spring, and the June 21 issue of the Patriot & Union noted that things were moving along. About this time, the “Third Street/Verbeke Street” lettering was set in place, no doubt with some fanfare from the stockholders. By Sept. 1, 1864, workmen were observed finally roofing the building.
In its original form, the stone market was a diamond in the rough. Described as having a brick floor with plaster interior walls (which were lined to imitate stone), heavy timber framing held up the roof. Historians have long wondered about the structural system at this point—how many floors actually were there in the original market?
Newspaper accounts tell of the YMCA holding Sunday school services on the “second floor.” Construction specs as published by both city newspapers mention a building 200 feet long, 50 feet wide and 40 feet high, with a hip roof at either end. Verbeke, in a letter to the Patriot & Union on Sept. 6, 1860, wrote that he hoped that the upper story could be rented out for machine shops or for public purposes. So, a substantial support system—perhaps post-and-beam—from the ground floor up must have been in place. The main hall had a ceiling 20 feet high; the second story was to be 150 feet deep with a 20-foot ceiling. It is currently a jumble of ductwork for the steam and ventilating systems. Photos of how it originally looked have yet to be discovered.
On Oct. 28, 1864, with the project ready to come on line, Secretary of the Commonwealth Eli Slifer finally signed the long-dormant market agreement into law, while a call went out in both the Telegraph and Patriot & Union for vendors. West Harrisburg Market House opened for its first day of business on Tuesday, Nov. 1, with nearly all of its 22 stalls rented, and all were reported gone by Nov. 19. The original market days were Tuesday and Friday morning between 5 and 10 a.m. and Saturday afternoon and evening between 3 and 8 p.m. But, interestingly, it was not until 1964 that the company would begin calling itself Broad Street Market in the city directory. Ironically, by then, most of the generation who still called it that had long since died or moved away.
Gradually, the market expanded. In 1869, a 50-by-86-foot wood frame extension, jerrybuilt, was added onto the James Street elevation. In 1880, it was replaced by yet another one-story frame, this time surmounted by a lantern or windowed superstructure on the roof. This building would stand until 1977, when it was torn down to create the current pedestrian plaza. Meanwhile, a more substantial freestanding brick market—constructed on the site where the second stone building should have gone—was built in three stages: 1874, 1877 and 1886.
In 1974-75, with the Broad Street Market proudly placed on the National Register of Historic Places and sold to the Harrisburg Redevelopment Authority (the city would acquire the market from HRA in 1978), some $1.4 million in federal funds was used to restore and improve what had become the last of Harrisburg’s once-vaunted farmer’s market system. In 1889, demolition of the original wooden sheds on Market Square had given way to convenient, well-situated neighborhood markets at Chestnut and Court, 4th and State, Market and 14th and Kelker and 4th streets, but all have been razed or closed down in the name of progress.
And now, 150 years on, we’ve come to a crossroads, so to speak, with people returning to the city to buy farmers’ fresh produce. Come Saturday, Nov. 1, Harrisburg needs to celebrate the diamond in the rough it still has, the crown jewel the Broad Street Market can be once again, if only we support it.
Happy Birthday, Broad Street Market.
Ken Frew is the librarian for the Historical Society of Dauphin County and the author of “Building Harrisburg: The Architects and Builders, 1719-1941.”
