According to Berks County Historian Kathy Scogna, author of The Ford at the Schuylkill, the Lenape and their Algonquian progenitors inhabited Poplar Neck for 9,000 years before the first Europeans settled there in the 1740s. Stone age people thousands of years ago made use of outcroppings or rock ledges for shelter. A little disturbed site was discovered on the Raudenbush Farm at Poplar Neck in the 1930s.

Known as the Raudenbush Rock Shelter, the site had a seventy to eighty foot overhang with a ledge projecting twelve feet. It was excavated in the summer of 1937 by Earle L. Poole, Assistant Director of the Reading Museum, with the assistance of Sam Wishnieski, a museum staff member. As Wishnieski dug to a depth of eight feet, each inch of ground was examined.

Among the artifacts recovered were a variety of stone and bone tools, pieces of pottery and the charred bone fragments of animal that had been eaten. All evidence of human habitation was carefully cataloged and taken to the Reading Museum where it remained on display until 1992.