EXPERT ‘Malvernologists’ Cora Weaver and Bruce Osborne have returned from namesake towns in America and Canada.
The pair visited the towns of Malvern, Ohio and Malvern, Toronto.
At the town hall in Ohio. the pair presented gifts and letters of greeting from mayor of Malvern Neil Morton and from councillor Dean Clarke, chairman of Malvern Hills District Council to Bob DeLongi, mayor of the town.
In return, they received gifts of a history of Malvern Ohio, a medallion showing the railway station and a pictorial wall hanging showing scenes from the town’s history.
After this, the president of the Ohio Malvern Historical Society, Jason Lombardi, gave them a tour of the old town.
Malvern, Ohio rests under hills and was build on land to the east and west of a crossroads.
The town has retained many of its old buildings, with some dating back to the 1840s.
In the Canadian Malvern, near Toronto, the pair learned of the history of the town, named in 1856-7 after a railway was built nearby.
The most likely person to have introduced the name Malvern was an Irish surveyor named George McPhilips, who was laying out plots of land near the town.
Most of the other settlers at the time were of German or Scottish extraction.
Today, the town is a modern and spacious village with little sign of its 19th century past.
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