Village History

The Chester Springs Studio is situated in the historic village of Yellow Springs in Chester Springs, Pennsylvania, thirty miles west of Philadelphia. With Historic Yellow Springs, Inc., a non-profit organization that preserves and interprets village history, we share a legacy that dates back to the years before the American Revolution.

The mineral springs that the Lenni Lenape called the "Yellow Waters" are at the heart of the village of Yellow Springs. Their ancient curative powers were recognized by the Lenape, and by 1722, English colonists established a health spa here which attracted many celebrated visitors throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, including the singer Jenny Lind.

In 1777, the Continental Congress commissioned the only Revolutionary War military hospital to be built in Yellow Springs. The stone ruins still stand today. After the Civil War, an orphanage was established in the village for the children of soldiers lost in the battle.

The village's history includes a long association with artists. In 1916, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts purchased the village as the site for its new Country School at Chester Springs. For three decades, the Academy used the buildings, the George Washington Inn, and the grounds of the village for its art programs, offering students the rare opportunity to paint "en plein air" and enjoy the splendor of a rural way of life.

The Academy closed its school in 1952, selling the property to a film company Good News Productions which produced compelling religious films and science fiction thrillers, and, to everyone’s delight, "The Blob," which propelled Steve McQueen to stardom.

It could be said that, since the 1960's, The Chester Springs Studio has been "germinating" a seed central to the purpose of the historic preservation effort at Yellow Springs. At that time, the vigorous artistic legacy established by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts continued to compel and inspire a return to an artistic purpose for the village, renewing use for the old class studios for teaching and exhibiting the visual arts. In 1965, area residents, disturbed by the possibility of losing the village to developers, organized around a group of local artists and introduced artistic programming to the community. The idea of a cultural sanctuary sheltered by a sacred site became the logical reason behind the property’s eventual purchase in 1974 by the parent organization now called Historic Yellow Springs, Inc.

Over time, several of the major buildings were sold, with appropriate restrictions: one to a non-profit organization for performing arts, two more to private owners, and, in 1979, the third, a restored barn studio with acreage to a new arts organization, the Chester Springs Studio. Connie Fraley and Lindsay Brinton served as the founding directors of this new visual arts organization. Together they re-dedicated and a re-introduced art to the village and formulated the Studio's mission to reflect artistic excellence worthy of its heritage.