Curiosity is her best tool. When Julie Longacre sketches a building, she delves into its history. She finds out as much as she can about its past – renovations, purposes, original plans – anything and everything. Her current project is no different.
“I’m just enchanted by Boyertown,” Longacre says. The Barto artist recently completed a collection of 19 notecards which feature important buildings in Boyertown’s history. The cards are being sold as part of the borough’s 150 anniversary and will be available at Building a Better Boyertown’s office on Philadelphia Ave. in Boyertown.
All sketches are new, but some are sketches she revisited and updated based on more information. Included in the collection are four buildings in Boyertown that she sketched for her first black and white print series — the oldest house in town located on Reading Avenue and Third Street; Keystone Steam Fire Engine; three buildings on Philadelphia Avenue and Walnut Street; and the Boyertown Inn.
One of the original four sketches includes the Boyertown Inn, currently owned by the Houck family. It was Debbie Houck who initiated the notecard project. Houck called Longacre to see if she had any prints of early Boyertown in her portfolio. As Longacre looked in her files, she kept pulling out prints and decided “you can’t have prints without history.”
Her interest in Boyertown’s history started with her first job. During high school she worked for Boyertown Photo Shop, owned by William Claussen. “Bill Claussen was a historian. He wrote articles for the Mercury about the area’s history. He was a great mentor; I didn’t realize how he would impact my career as an artist,” Longacre says.
For the information on the back of the notecards, Longacre did her research at the Boyertown Historical Society in the William Claussen Library. In a way, my career has come full circle – 57 years later Bill Claussen is still helping, she observed.
Information about the building on the back of each notecard include – its origins, purposes, place in Boyertown’s history, and occasionally Longacre’s impressions of the structure.
With all this information and prints sorted out, Longacre went to Building a Better Boyertown and offered this project to them for the 150th anniversary. As she worked on the project, suggestions came in for other buildings to be included in the collection.
She finally cut off the sketches at 19 despite having plenty of other buildings to consider.
Marianne Deery, Boyertown’s mayor, said: “Some of the notecards are actually heart rendering. They are beautiful pictorials of the old buildings with a little story about them. Anyone who is historically minded about our wonderful town of Boyertown would really want this collection.” She added, “They are well worth having and beautifully done as Julie always does.”
