Family Stories

How the first Pippins came to America

In the spring of 1882, a young couple named Thomas and Mary Pippin boarded a steamship in Liverpool with little more than a trunk of clothes and a letter of introduction to a distant cousin in Pennsylvania. What followed was a journey that would define the family for generations.

A correspondence preserved across a century

When Robert Pippin enlisted in the summer of 1917, his mother began writing to him every week without fail. Forty-three of those letters survived the war, tucked inside a tin box that Robert carried in his kit bag until the day he came home.

Building a life on Pippin land

The farmhouse that Thomas Pippin built in 1905 stood for nearly eighty years. Three generations were born in its upstairs bedroom. The family still speaks of it as though it were a person — as though it had a character of its own.

When the scattered family came home

Nobody is quite sure whose idea it was to hold the first Pippin family reunion in the summer of 1983. What is certain is that 47 people showed up, from as far away as California and Florida, and that by the end of the weekend, everyone agreed it should happen every year.

The family on the home front

During the Second World War, four Pippin men served overseas. At home, the women who waited for them kept the family together through rationing, worry, and the particular courage of those who have no choice but to endure.