How did Geryville, Pennsylvania get it’s name? This page provides a brief history about the naming of Geryville, Pennsylvania, the people who settled it, and the industry rising within it.
Village in the northwestern corner of Milford Township on Route 922 and near County Line Road. When a post office was established in the village on January 6, 1865, with Joseph Kriebel as postmaster, the name adopted was Gery. This name was changed to Geryville on March 8, 1871, when Jesse Gery was appointed postmaster. The post office has been discontinued, and mail is now received by Pennsburg rural delivery. The first known name of the village was Aurora. It is so called in Gordon’s Gazetteer of Pennsylvania in 1832, and on maps, it is marked Aurora as late as 1850.1 A pottery and a tannery were located there in that year, both doing a flourishing business. In 1870 the village had a hotel, store, several shops, and a dozen dwelling houses.2 The tavern is very old and is the same as that for which Conrad Marks secured a license in 1796, three years before the Fries Rebellion, when the old tavern became the center of much of the turmoil of that short-lived uprising. Marks in his petition to the Quarter Sessions Court at Newtown for a license states that he had “removed to the well-known tavern on the Macungie Road in said township of Milford, formerly occupied by George Horlacker,” and also that the house had been “kept as such above forty years.” Years after that, the house was known as Gery’s, indicating a change of ownership to the family for which the village was named. On a “Map Showing the Route of the North Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia to Bethlehem with its Branches to Doylestown and Freemansburg and its connections with the Lehigh Valley Railroad,” made in January 1857 by Solomon W. Roberts, Chief Engineer, Geryville is marked Springville. This may be one of those errors frequently found in maps hastily prepared for special occasions, the special occasion in this instance being the opening of the newly built North Pennsylvania Railroad for travel and freight business on January 1, 1857.