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Lucile Lewis Simler died December 20, 2005, in Edina, Minnesota, of complications from a fall she suffered the previous spring. As a research scholar, Lucy’s work helped elucidate the land and labor systems and the functioning of townships in colonial southeastern Pennsylvania; as a public historian, her work organizing and interpreting Chester County records greatly facilitated the scholarship of two generations of other historians who have made the region one of the most closely studied in early American history.

Lucy received a B.A. in political science from Bryn Mawr in 1948 and an M.Ed. in history and mathematics in 1957 from the College of Saint Thomas. She began working in colonial Chester County historical records in the 1970s (inspired, she noted, by the encouragement of Richard Dunn and Russell Menard) and published her first scholarly essay, “The Township: The Community of Rural Pennsylvania,” in 1982 in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Appearing at roughly the same time as Bruce Daniels’s work on the Connecticut town and Lois Green Carr’s on colonial Maryland counties, Lucy’s study alerted scholars to the vibrancy, functions, and significance of the colonial township in eastern Pennsylvania. For the next decade, Lucy mined the county, provincial, and state tax records of Chester County at the Chester County Archives (West Chester), linking them with probate records at the same institution and with the account book collections at the Chester County Historical Society (West Chester), and working at both institutions as a consultant in projects to catalog and preserve these records. She guided many younger scholars—including several from the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies (now the McNeil Center)—through the intricacies of local records and shared generously from her own work in the archives.

In addition to helping researchers, Lucy worked closely with the staff at the Archives and the Library of CCHS. Numerous young archivists learned about government records and manuscripts by following Lucy around and taking copious notes. Her involvement did not end when she returned to Minnesota at the end of each summer, as she kept staff informed of her work, whether it was a conference paper or the meaning of a cryptic remark scrawled on the margin of a tax assessment. Any time there was a question about what a record was or how it should be interpreted, it would go on a list of things to ask Lucy. She almost always knew the answer, or would know where to find it.

From this work came her 1986 article, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania: The Case of Chester County,” in the William and Mary Quarterly. The essay defined tenancy carefully in the context of Chester County’s mix of agricultural and artisanal occupations, showed that the nature and significance of tenancy evolved over time, and argued that through the middle decades of the eighteenth century the high incidence of tenancy in Chester County was a sign of the region’s prosperity rather than an index of thwarted opportunity for the landed poor.

Lucy published two coauthored articles in the late 1980s that examined in more detail the labor relations and landownership in southeastern Pennsylvania. In the late Stephen Innes’s edited collection, Work and Labor in Early America, she authored “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820”; the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (June 1989), edited by Susan E. Klepp, included her essay, “The ‘Best Poor Man’s Country’ in 1783: The Population Structure of Rural Society in Late-Eighteenth Century Southeastern Pennsylvania.” Both essays underscored the importance of the people perhaps best designated as “cottagers” and taxed as “inmates” in Chester County. Cottagers had less security than tenants but more than wage laborers. In “Rural Labor,” Lucy demonstrated that for much of the eighteenth century, cottagers and the landlords for whom they worked had a mutually beneficial economic relationship. Those relationships were occasionally sustained over several years and often provided the supplemental farm labor that landowners needed if they were to both farm and practice a craft. In “Rural Society,” Lucy called historians’ attention to the inclusion in state tax records of returns from the federally mandated (but not always undertaken) 1783 census. Here she used both Chester and Lancaster County records to provide a full picture of the social structure in southeastern Pennsylvania in general, and, in particular, of the continuing economic dependence of the white farming population on slavery.

Then, in a 1990 article in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Lucy completed her analysis of labor relations in early Pennsylvania by examining the situation of wage workers between 1750 and 1820. This essay drew more heavily than her previous work on account books and incorporated data from detailed wage and price series on which she was working at the time (but never had occasion to publish). In the numerous conference papers she gave during the 1980s, Lucy also examined the position of women in the wage economy of Chester County and the economic consequences of the American Revolution for the region through a study of sheriff sales. Her last published work was the entry on “Hired Labor” in The Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (1993). She presented what was likely her last paper in 1996, at the Philadelphia Center. In this, one could see the framework for her intended book on the early industrial development of the Philadelphia region, a work that her declining health did not allow her to write.

Lucy was born in Philadelphia in 1926, but moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1951, after her marriage to Jim Simler. While returning frequently to Chester County for her research, she also helped organize an early American history workshop at the University of Minnesota and was one of the planners and fundraisers for the University’s Center for Early Modern History as well as its associate director. Donations can be made in her name to the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester, Pennsylvania, or to the Center for Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota.

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