Judd L. Minick

Judd Lupfer Minick was born in the tiny borough of Shade Gap, Pennsylvania (population 170 in 1880, 107 in 2020), the first of six children of a "Tanner and Bark Estimator", as Judd described his father in a delayed birth record he filed in 1942. As an adult, Judd is listed in the census as an electrician (1900), then chief draughtsman (1910), and electrical engineer (1920) for the Pennsylvania Railroad in Altoona PA.

He moved his family to Narberth sometime in the 1920s, and in 1934 bought the house at 25 Windsor. In 1942, Minick set about to write and photograph A Pictorial History of "one of the most attractive residential communities in the entire Commonwealth."

A Pictorial History

What has come down to us was scanned from a photocopy made by Victoria Donohoe from the original assembled in a loose-leaf binder belonging to Minick's granddaughter Phyllis Mairs Scharf. Many of its photographs appeared in 1945 in Our Borough, A 50th Anniversary Report, where Narberth Borough Council praised "Mr. J.L. Minick, whose scholarly researches into Narberth's early history set the Committee a stern standard to follow."

There's a lot more we'd like to know about this project. Why did Minick undertake it? Was it completed? Some images are missing descriptions, and a couple of descriptions are missing details. Is the numbering scheme significant? (He was an engineer, after all.) Are there more photos? Is this the order that the author intended? We have preserved it as Victoria assembled her photocopies.

What we do know is that it's a fascinating portrait of 1940s Narberth, unusual for its emphasis on images. It's a gift from Judd Minick to his adopted home town, modestly described by its author as a "readable and interesting record of the history of Narberth."

Read A Pictorial History in the Narbeth Sources section.