West Overton was a small Mennonite community located in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania that today is the location of West Overton Village and Museums, a museum displaying the history and accomplishments of the people who lived there. The first family to settle in this village were the Overholts, led by Henry Kolb Overholt. They were a Mennonite family of German-Swiss heritage and Anabaptist religious roots. Henry Kolb's son Abraham began distilling and selling whiskey in the early nineteenth century, resulting in the Overholts becoming very wealthy. The focus of this project is a diary written by Karl Frick Overholt, one of the great-grandsons of Abraham Overholt. The contents of this diary include family stories, ancestry trees, diagrams, and newspaper clippings, among other things, making it an invaluable resource to the museum and interesting to analyze.
