USA > Pennsylvania > Bucks County > The history of Bucks County, Pennsylvania : from the discovery of the Delaware to the present time > Part 37
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
built on Mr. Evans's own farm, lately in the possession of his grand- son, J. Judson Evans, on the road leading to New Britain, half a mile west of Sandy Ridge school-house in Doylestown township. It was afterward used for a school-house, but has long since been torn down. Mr. Evans preached for the congregation to his death, in 1824, in his eighty-sixth year, when the little flock scattered. He was at the head of Universalism in his day, and was present at every convention from 1790 to 1824. He was buried in the Mennonite graveyard above Doylestown. He did a large amount of public neighborhood business, and attended to considerable in the courts before the seat of justice was removed to Doylestown. He was noted for his penmanship. Two of his pamphlets on religious sub- jects were printed at Doylestown : one a sermon on "Absolute Pre- destination," preached at the opening of the Universalist convention at Philadelphia, May 17th, 1806, the other, a lecture delivered in the Universalist church, Philadelphia, in June, 1809, entitled "Remarks on the Baptist Association Letter." On the title-page of the latter he is styled : "Minister of the Universalian church, at New Britain." At his death his manuscripts were scattered and lost.
The record of the opening of original roads in New Britain is brief, but none of them are as old as the township. In 1730 the inhabitants petitioned for a road from the county line via Whitehall- ville, New Britain and Doylestown to Buckingham meeting. It was probably not granted at that time, but shortly afterward. It followed substantially the track of the present road between the same points which meet the York road at Centreville. It was asked for "as an outlet from the Jerseys to North Wales and the Schuylkill," and soon became a thoroughfare of travel. The Poor house road was laid out and opened about 1745, by the "New meeting-house " to the north-east line road in Warwick. One of the earlist roads in the township is that for many years called the Butler road, and I believe is still so called by some, because Simon Butler had it opened. It starts from the store-house west of the bridge at Whitehallville, and runs to Louisville, a hamlet on the Bethlehem road, and was turnpiked a few years ago. It crosses the county line at Pleasant- ville, and joins the Bethlehem road at what was Rutter's, now Foust's tanyard, and was opened to give the New Britain settlers an outlet to Philadelphia.
There is a tradition that the great Indian chief, Tamany, died and was buried near a spring at the foot of Prospect hill, three and
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
one-half miles west of Doylestown. It is handed down in the Shewell family that a great chief, whoever he was, was taken sick while go- ing to attend a treaty, and was left in charge of his daughter in a wigwam ; that, chagrined at being left behind, he took his own life, and was buried near the spring, at the foot of a big poplar, by Wal- ter, grandfather of Nathaniel Shewell. The most accurate com- putation of time fixes the date about 1749, but there is no evidence that the chieftain alluded to was Tamany.
This celebrated Indian first appears in history in his treaty of June 23d, 1683, with William Penn, by which he granted him all the lands "lying between Pennapecka and Nessaninechs creek, and all along Nessaninechs creek," in consideration of as much wam- pum and goods as Penn might please to give him. Tamany, or Tamanend, appears in other treaties for lands in this county. But little is known of him. Gabriel Thomas, in his account of the province, published in 1698, mentions him as a great Delaware chief, but he leaves the inference that he was deceased. Hecke- welder says. "All we know of him is that he was an ancient Dela- ware chief that never had his equal. He was in the highest degree endowed with wisdom, virtue, prudence, charity, affability, meek- ness, hospitality, in short, with every good and noble qualification that a human possesses." The tradition that Tamany died and was buried near Prospect hill is not received without contradiction. Mahlon S. Kirkbride alleges that he died in a cabin in Bucking- ham township, and that a white neighbor buried his remains. He was a firm friend to William Penn, and sometimes sat in Friends' meeting. If Tamany died about 1749, it is singular that none of his English contemporaries mention it.
New Britain has three villages, the one named after the township at the crossing of the old North Wales and Alms-house roads, Chal- font, on the North Wales road, a mile west of New Britain, and New Galena, three miles north-west of Doylestown.
A dozen dwellings, smith shop, two stores, and a Baptist church which stands over the line in Doylestown township, and a small frame railroad station, comprise New Britain village. On the 1st of May, 1753, Thomas and Jane James conveyed a small lot to one Rebecca Humphrey, widow, near where the store of Jesse Shay stands. She afterward married William Thomas, who probably built a log house on the lot before 1760, the first at the cross-roads. Between 1740 and 1750 Jonathan Mason purchased twenty acres of
.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
Daniel Stephens, west of the Alms-house road, about opposite the railroad station, and on which, and near the house of Peter Landis, miller, he built a dwelling, and fulling-mill that was run by the waters of Cook's creek. The dwelling was repaired in 1830, and the old mill demolished in 1850. David Riale, now eighty-seven years of age, says that the first and only house at New Britain village, at the close of the last century, was owned and occupied by Alice Gray. On the corner opposite James E. Hill's a building was . erected by Ephraim Thomas, in 1807, for a pottery, which was sub- sequently changed into a dwelling. The post-office at New Britain, the oldest in the township, was established in 1829, the commission of the first postmaster, Isaac W. James, bearing date December 28th. Chalfont, named after Chalfont St. Giles, a parish of Bucks, England, in whose Friends' burying-ground William Penn lies buried, is situated at the forks of Neshaminy, formed by the main stream and the north branch. Its earliest village name was Barndt- ville, then Whitehallville, but when the railroad station, and subse- quently the post-office, was changed to Chalfont, the village was called the same. Simon Mathew was the first owner of property, and built on the easterly side of the village, and his brother Edward, owned a considerable tract on the north side. He and a number of others of the name immigrated to Virginia, and Mathews county, on the Chesapeake, was named after them. The first building occupied as a public house was erected by Henry Lewis, an early settler of Hilltown, who owned one hundred acres in the neighbor- hood, and it was kept by his son-in-law, George Kungle. It was built at least fifteen or twenty years before the Revolution, and is still standing near the present tavern. During the war Kungle removed to Chester county, and thenceforth the house was kept by James Thomas, who still owned it at the close of the century. It is said to have been noted as a place for cock-fighting during the Revolu- tion. James Lewis, a teamster and soldier of that war, used to relate that Morgan's riflemen, on their march to Quebec, staid a week at Chalfont, where they amused themselves and the inhabitants by shooting at shingles held by each other. When Thomas kept the tavern there were three houses in the village, one stood opposite Haldeman's store, owned by Thomas Mathew, and a second across the bridge. The present village consists of a Lutheran church, two taverns, two stores, divers mechanics, and about forty dwellings. Considerable business has sprung up at this point since the railroad
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
was opened, and large quantities of farm produce are shipped hence to the Philadelphia market. Both the main stream and branch of Neshaminy are spanned by wooden bridges. New Galena is a hamlet of half a dozen houses, and is the seat of lead mines which have been worked by different parties, but never with success. The ore is said to be rich and in large quantities. A post-office was first established at Whitehallville in 1843, and William Stephens appointed postmaster.
The surface of New Britain is broken in parts. A ridge runs through the township from Plumstead to the Montgomery line, north of the north branch of Neshaminy, which is called both Iron hill and Highlands. It sheds the water to the south, and from the summit is obtained a fine view of the country in that direction. Prospect hill, in the south-western part of the township, on the upper state road leading to Norristown, is the shoulder of a plateau rather than a hill, to which you ascend after crossing the Neshaminy, and which extends away to the south-west. From the brow is one of the most charming prospects in the county, whence the eye ranges over a delightful scope of cultivated country, and follows the wind- ings of the Neshaminy. The hill and the land across the creek to the north were long the property of the Kelsey family, and in olden times it was called Kelsey's hill. James Forsythe settled near Prospect hill, and his family intermarried with the Kelseys, both Scotch-Irish. Thomas Forsythe, elected canal-commissioner in 1853, was a descendant of this family.
An hundred years ago the crossing of the Neshaminy at God- shalk's mill, on the upper state road, was called Morgan's ford, and the crossing of the same stream at Castle valley, Barton's ford, named from families in New Britain long since extinct in the male line. As early as 1722 Richard Mitchel built a grist mill in Hill- town or New Britain township, but we have not been able to fix the locality. It was the next earliest mill to Butler's. Smith Cornell owned a mill there before 1759, Miller and Evans in 1793, and Fretz's mill in 1795, which year a road was laid out from it to the Bethlehem road "rear the German Baptist meeting-house."
There are but few notable events to be mentioned in connection with New Britain. In 1805 Benjamin Snodgrass, while proceeding with his wife, in a chase, to visit their son, a minister of the gospel, at Hanover, in Dauphin county, was upset, from which he received wounds that shortly caused his death. As recently as 1821 a wild-
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
cat, which weighed eleven pounds and measured three feet nine inches in length, was killed on the farm of Moses Aaron, four miles from Doylestown. Among the aged men of New Britain, whose death is recorded, can be mentioned Colonel Jacob Reed, an officer of the Revolutionary army, who died November 2d, 1820, in his ninety-first year, and Robin, a black man, who died in 1805, at the age of ninety-six.
The enumeration of 1784 gives New Britain seven hundred and sixty-four inhabitants, one hundred and forty-nine dwellings, and one hundred and thirteen outhouses, with an area of fifteen thousand eight hundred and thirty acres of land. This includes the five thou- sand three hundred and fifty acres embraced in Doylestown when that township was laid out, in 1818. The present area is ten thou- sand four hundred and eighty acres. In 1810 the population was 1,474 ; in 1820, 1,082, after Doylestown had been formed ; in 1830, 1,201, and 270 taxables ; 1840, 1,304; 1850, 1,311 whites and 2 colored; 1860, 1,637 whites and 2 colored; and in 1870, 1,692 whites and 15 colored, of which 1,595 were native-born and 112 of foreign birth.
The mill of William Godshalk, together with one hundred acres, was owned by Samuel Martin in 1752, who, being a millwright, probably built it. John Davis was a justice of the peace in 1778, before whom the citizens of that township took the oath of allegiance to the new state government.
398
HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
CHAPTER XXIV.
PLUMSTEAD.
1725.
Location of Plumstead .- First land-owner .- Henry Child .- Christopher Day .- Tho- mas Brown .- John Dyer .- First mill .- Easton road opened .- William Michener. -Old draft .- Township organized .- The Child family .- The Doanes .- Friends' meeting .- Remains of church .- Its history .- Old graveyard .- Mennonite meet- ing-house .- Charles Huston .- Indians .- Last wolf killed .- Roads opened .- Plumsteadville, Point Pleasant et al .- Oldest house .- "Poor Plumstead."-Im- migration to Canada .- John Ellicott Carver .- Horse company .- Population .- Aged persons .- Morgan Hinchman .- Fretz's mill .- Post-offices.
IMMEDIATELY north of Buckingham and Solebury lies a tract of country divided into valley and plain by Pine run and North branch, that flow west into the Neshaminy, and by Hickory, Geddes, and Cabin runs, that empty into the Delaware. In most parts the ground falls gradually away to the streams, and the contiguous slopes are joined by level stretches of farm land. This region of valley and plain and winding creeks is Plumstead township. now a little more than one hundred and fifty years old.
English Friends pushed their way up into the woods of Plum- stead, through Buckingham and Solebury at an early day, and were on the extreme limit of the tidal-wave of civilization that swep upward from the Delaware. Here, after a time, were encountered
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
other streams of immigration, and the followers of Penn were arrested in their course by others contending for the mastery in settling the forest. The lower and middle parts of the township were settled mainly by Friends, and the upper part by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and later by Germans.
One of the first to own land in the township was Francis Plum- stead, an ironmonger of London, who received a grant of two thou- sand five hundred acres from William Penn, in consideration of £50, dated the 25th of October, 1683. Of this grant, one hundred acres were surveyed to Plumstead in the township which bears his name, by virtue of two warrants, dated the 21st and 29th of June, 1704, for which a patent was issued the following January. It joined the lands of widow Mesgrave or Musgrove, Joseph Paul, and Elizabeth Sand, who were already land-owners, and probably settlers. The entire grant must have been located in the township, for we find from John Cutler's re-survey of 1703, that the whole two thousand five hundred acres are returned to Francis Plumstead. He never came to America, but conveyed his land to Richard Hill, a merchant of Philadelphia. In January, 1681, William Penn granted five hundred acres to Henry Child, which he located in Plumstead, and which was confirmed to him in 1705. He gave it to his son Ceplias Child in 1716, but the latter probably never lived in the township. Henry Child owned about one thousand acres in all. In 1686 Arthur Cooke, of Frankford, received a patent for two thousand acres, which lay in part along the north-west line of the township, on what is now the Dublin road. At his death, in 1699, his widow and executrix, Margaret Cooke, and his son, Jolin, conveyed one thousand acres to Clement and Thomas Dungan, set- tlers in the township, and probably descendants of Reverend Tho- mas Dungan, of Cold spring. In 1708 they sold fifty acres to Christopher Day, who passed his life in Plumstead, and died in 1748. Day was a considerable land-owner, and in 1723 he sold one hundred and fifty acres to John Basset, of Philadelphia, who in turn conveyed seventy-five acres to John Dyer the same year.
One of the earliest settlers in the south-east corner of the town- ship was Thomas Brown, who located in the woods about Dyers- town probably as early as 1712, or before, an immigrant from Barking, Essex county, England, where his son Thomas was born November, 1696. After living a few years in Philadelphia he re-
1 He probably gave the name to the stream now called Cook's run.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
moved to Plumstead, where he spent the remainder of his days. His son Thomas became a minister among Friends, and died at Philadelphia, whither he had removed, August 21st, 1757. His declaration of intention of marriage with Elizabeth Davison, Feb ruary 7th, 1720, was the first made in Buckingham quarterly meet- ing. The first to encroach upou the retirement of Thomas Brown was John Dyer, a minister among Friends, an immigrant from Gloucestershire, England, with his family, about 1712. He first settled in Philadelphia, then came out to what was known as the "five-mile mill," on the York road, and thence removed to the woods of Plumstead. On the 16th of June, 1718, he purchased one hundred and fifty-one acres of Cephas Child, including the Dyer property at Dyerstown. He is said to have likewise purchased the improvements of Thomas Brown, who removed farther back into the woods, about where the Plumstead meeting-house stands. The Dyer property only passed out of the family a few years ago, when Doctor John Dyer, a descendant, removed to Philadlphia. John Dyer was a useful man in Plumstead. He built the first mill2 in the township, and one of the first in this section of the county, about where the present inill stands at Dyerstown. He was instrumental in having the Easton road laid out and opened from Governor Keith's place at the county line to his mill, and for many years it bore no other name than "Dyer's mill road." He died the 31st of the 11th month, 1738, and was buried at the Friends' meeting-house in Plumstead. He owned in all about six hundred acres. When John Dyer came into the township wild animals were so plenty that the settlers took their guns with them to meeting, and the beavers built their dams across Pine run. The Indians were numerous, but friendly. William Michener, one of the ancestors of all in the township bearing the name, was one of the earliest settlers, being there in 1725, and owned four hundred acres of land. The ances- tor of the Nash family, the great-grandfather of Samuel, came from England, and was buried at Horsham. He was probably a Friend, and settled in that township. His descendants are Mennonites and Germanized. His son Joseph, who removed from Bedminster to Tinicum, where he died, was an elder of the Mennonite Deep Run meeting.
On an old draft of Plumstead, drawn March 11, 1724, are marked
2 Built about 1725, with money borrowed of Abraham Chapman, of Wrightstown. The present stone bridge over Pine run at that place was built in 1798.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
the following land-owners, all located in the south-west part of the township, near the Buckingham line : Arthur Day, Henry Child, John Dyer, (two tracts,) Richard Hill, fifteen hundred acres, Abraham Hilyer, Silas MacCarty, William Michener, 3 John Earl, James Shaw, James Brown, Henry Paul, Samuel Barker, Thomas Brown, jr., Richard Lundy, and H. Large. No doubt there were others, but at this time the settlers did not extend far into the woods. Probably some of those named were not inhabitants of the town- ship in 1724.
An effort was made to organize a township about 1715, when the settlers north of Buckingham petitioned the court to lay it off. On the 17th of June a draft of the survey of a new township, which probably accompanied the report of the jury, was ordered to be filed. The territory asked to be laid off contained about fourteen thousand acres, and the township was to be called Plumstead. The court could not have approved the report of the jury if it reported in favor of the new township, for Plumstead was not laid out and organized until ten years later. It is probable the prayer of the petitioners was not granted because of the lack of population. In March, 1725, twenty inhabitants of a district of country north of Buckingham, not yet organized into a township, namely, Thomas Shaw, John Brown, Alexander Brown, Richard Lundy, John Lundy, Henry Large, Thomas Brown, jr., Humphrey Roberts, John Earl, Thomas Earl, William Michener, William Woodcock, John Dyer, Samuel Dyer, Abraham Hayster, Herman Buster, Silas MacCarty, William Wilkinson, Christopher Day, and James Shaw, petitioned the court of quarter sessions to lay off "a certain quan- tity or parcel of land to be erected into the form of a township," the boundaries of which were to begin "at the uppermost corner of Buckingham at the corner of Richard Day's land." This embraced what is now Plumstead and Bedminster. The survey of the town- ship was probably returned at the June term, but we have found no record of it. It was named after Francis Plumstead,+ ironmonger, of London, one of the earliest land-owners in the township. The present area of Plumstead is twelve thousand eight hundred acres.
3 Margaret Michener, relict of William Michener, died in Plumstead February 15th, 1821, aged ninety-three years.
+ There were several of this name in the province, principally in Philadelphia. Clement Plumstead was mayor of that city in 1741, and his son William filled that office 1750-54-55, and died in 1769.
26
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
The Child family, not "Childs," as spelled at present, is among the oldest in the township. Henry, the first of the name, who ap- pears to have settled in Warminster, gave the five hundred acres he located in Plumstead to his son Cephas,5 in 1716. He was a Friend, and at one time a member of Arch street meeting, but took a cer- tificate to Middletown monthly meeting, probably at the time he came into the county. He is said to have been married when he came to America, but at what time he came to Plumstead is not known. He was a member of assembly in 1747-48. Among the descendants of this family was the late Colonel Cephas Grier Childs, of Philadelphia, who was born in Plumstead, September 8th, 1793, and died in Philadelphia in his seventy-eighth year. His mother was a daughter of Matthew Grier, a descendant of a Scotch-Irish ancestor who settled about the Deep Run meeting-house, and at the time of her marriage was the widow of Major William Kennedy, who was killed at the capture of Moses Doane, in 1783. Colonel Childs achieved considerable reputation as an engraver, and was afterward, and for many years, proprietor and editor of the Com- mercial List and Price Current. He was a volunteer soldier in the war of 1812-15, and for many years afterward took deep interest in military matters. In 1831 he visited Europe in the interest of the engraver's art, carrying with him letters of introduction from Presi- dent Jackson and other distinguished gentlemen.
The Doanes came into the township, from Massachusetts, subse- quent to the first settlers, and settled near the meeting-house, and Is- rael Doane was there in 1726. The sons of Joseph, who was a good citizen, became notorious in the Revolution as tories and marauders, and those who were not killed or hanged had to flee the country. The old Doane homestead is now owned by Jacob Hagerty. Joseph Brown, probably the son of Thomas, an original settler, purchased two hundred and fifty acres in 1734, John Boyle three hundred acres in 1736, and the same year Joseph Large, probably a son of Henry, who had been in the township twelve or fifteen years, pur- chased land. The Hinkles came in about the middle of the century. Two brothers from Germany, Philip and Joseph, settled at German- town, whence Joseph migrated to North Carolina, and Philip came up to Plumstead. He was the grandfather of Casper Hinkle, senior. Both brothers were soldiers in the Revolutionary war. The Car-
5 A Cephas Childs died in Plumstead in 1815, at the age of ninety, probably a son or grandson of the first settler.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
lisles and Penningtons settled in the township considerably before the middle of the last century. John Carlisle and Sarah Pennington were married at Plumstead meeting, July 5th, 1757, and she died in 1785. They were the grandparents of Mrs. Carr, of Danborough, she and Rachel Rich being their only two surviving grandchildren. The McCallas were in Plumstead before 1750, William, the first comer, being an immigrant from Scotland, but it is not known whether he was married when he came to America, or married here. His son Andrew, who was born in the township the 6th of Novem- ber, 1757, removed to Kentucky, where he married and had six children. One of his sons was the Reverend William Latta Mc- Calla, a distinguished Presbyterian minister, and General Jackson's chaplain in the Seminole war, and another, the late John Moore McCalla, adjutant-general of the American forces at the massacre at the river Raisin. William McCalla removed, before the Revolution, from Plumstead to Philadelphia, where he formed the acquaintance of General Lafayette, who was a frequent visitor at his house. We do not know at what time he died. Henry Huddleston owned land in Plumstead in 1752, and the same year John Watson sur- veyed forty-eight acres to Robert McFarlin, on a warrant dated June 17th.
We have a tradition that the first meetings of Friends, at private houses, were held sometime in the winter of 1727. However this may be, we find that on the 2d of October, 1728, Plumstead Friends asked to have a meeting for worship every other First day, which was granted, and it was held at the house of Thomas Brown. The first meeting-house was ordered to be erected in 1729, and the loca- tion was fixed near where the present house stands, by the previous opening of a graveyard at that spot. The ground, fifteen acres, was the gift of Thomas Brown and his sons Thomas and Alexander, in consideration of fifteen shillings. The deed bears date the 19th of January, 1730, and was executed in trust to Richard Lundy, jr., William Michener, Josiah Dyer and Joseph Dyer. The spot on which the first log meeting-honse was erected, in 1730, was selected by Thomas Watson, Thomas Canby, Abraham Chapman, Cephas Child and John Dyer, committee appointed by the monthly meeting of Buckingham and Wrightstown. This house stood until 1752, when it was torn down and the present stone meeting-house was built. During the Revolutionary war this building was used as an hospital, and marks of blood are still upon the floor. Some
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