Beggarstown or Bettelhausen was a small community that was located in the present day neighborhood of Mount Airy in Northwest Philadelphia in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It centered primarily along a stretch of relatively flat land along Germantown Avenue roughly between Upsal Street and Gorgas Lane. History Beggarstown (also Beggars-town or Beggar Town) or Bettelhausen was formed out of the so-called "Sidelands" of Germantown. The Sidelands were a section of Germantown Township that had been set aside so that the owners of lots in the center of Germantown could have access to an equal share of land in the entire village of Germantown section of Germantown Township. It covered the area from Washington Lane to roughly Sedgwick Street and Stenton and Wissahickon Avenues. As the Germantown village, founded in 1683, filled up, settlers began to move northwest along Germantown Avenue. By the 1730s and 1740s, the Sidelands area was subdivided into smaller house lots. The origin of the name is explained in 1770 by Morgan Edwards in his section on the early history of the Germantown Church of the Brethren, as follows: [The Beggarstown meeting] takes its distinction from a little village of ... [this] name, in the township of Germantown, eight miles NW from the city.... On the same lot [of their meeting house] stands their old building erected by one John Pettikoffer for his dwelling house in 1731; and because it was the first house in the place, and erected by a beggar, the village assumed the name of Beggarstown. The German form of the name, which is probably the original form, is Bettelhausen — coming from the German word betteln, which means to beg, and hausen, which is a common suffix added to place names (like Schaffhausen) which roughly means town or village (derived from the German word Haus — house). One of the earliest uses of the name Bettelhausen appears in a newspaper ad in Christopher Sower's newspaper. One reference from 1757 appears in the church records of Saint Michael's Lutheran Church, Germantown, where the burial register entry for Nicolaus Rausch notes that he was a resident "hier in Bettelhausen." Though some late 19th century Philadelphia histories claim that the name is a corruption of Bebberstown, named for Rev. Mathias van Bebber, this is incorrect. Mathias van Bebber was not a minister and he had no direct connection with this area of Germantown Township. van