Histand

Also written Hiestand. A Mennonite family name long associated with Doylestown and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where the family farmed, kept shops and photographed the place they lived in.

Coming to Doylestown

Jacob Hiestand (1791–1877) and Barbara Swartz Hiestand lived in Allen Township, Northampton County, and belonged to the Mennonite congregation there. In 1832 they moved to Milford Township, Bucks County, where Jacob was ordained a preacher in the Swamp congregation. Ten years later, in 1842, the family moved again — to Doylestown Township, buying a farm along what is now Shady Retreat Road — and joined the Doylestown Mennonite congregation.

Their son Joshua Histand (1817–1866) was farming on his own account by 1846 and married Catharine Hunsberger of Hilltown Township early in 1851. His record books, with entries from 1836 to 1860, survive and list what a Bucks County farm bought and sold: a colt for $26.75 in 1837, nine cows for $117 in 1846.

Places

The family farmed along Shady Retreat Road in Doylestown Township, next to the Doylestown Mennonite meetinghouse and its cemetery. In Doylestown borough, the Samuel and Rebecca Histand House on North Clinton Street, built in the early 1870s, is a recognised piece of the town’s architectural history.

William L. Histand, photographer

William L. Histand (1911–1994) was born in Doylestown Township on the farm of his parents, Samuel S. and Susan Landis Histand, beside the Doylestown Mennonite meetinghouse — the twelfth of their sixteen children. He opened a barber shop at 208–210 North Main Street in Doylestown in 1931, next door to his brother’s grocery.

From the 1930s onward he photographed Mennonite and small-town life around Doylestown, Cross Keys, Sandy Ridge and Pine Run. About a thousand of his images are now held by the Mennonite Heritage Center, and they remain an unusually close record of the community in those years.

He had four sons: Thomas, Timothy (1940–2026), Leonard and Lowell. Timothy married Kathryn Hunsberger. It was Leonard who, after his father’s death, scanned the negatives, prints and slides he had inherited — the collection now at the Mennonite Heritage Center reached it through him.

Sources

This site

histand.net is owned by Ivan Histand — a son of Timothy, and a grandson of William — who builds software. His own page is at ivan.histand.net.