USA > Pennsylvania > Bucks County > The history of Bucks County, Pennsylvania : from the discovery of the Delaware to the present time > Part 47
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
Marshall killed one thousand and three hundred deer with it, be- sides other animals, and unnumbered Indians. Eliza Kean, his granddaughter and a daughter of his son Thomas, eighty-two years old, living on the New Jersey side of the Delaware, just below Frenchtown, has his eight-day clock, in good running order, and his chest of drawers, three hundred years old, which his father brought from England. Philip Hinkle has a shot-gun that belonged to Ed ward Marshall.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
CHAPTER XXXI.
TINICUM.
1738.
Boundaries .- Indian township .- London company .- The Marshalls .- Joseph Haver- ford .- Matthew Hughes .- Adam Meisner .- Casper Kolb .- John Praul .- A settler at Point Pleasant .- Hessians settled in Tinicum .- Settlers petition for township .- Boundaries .- Allowed by court .- Original settlers English and Scotch-Irish .- Early roads .- Germans .- The Williamses .- Bridge over To- hickon .- Arthur Erwin .- His death .- Joseph Smith and Smithtown .- Coal first burned in smith-shops .- Charles Smith .- Edmund Kinsey .- Character of Joseph Smith .- Smithtown destroyed .- The Tinicum islands .- Marshall's rifle .- The homestead .- Tinicum Presbyterian church .- Brick church .- Baptist church .- Point Pleasant, Erwinna, Head-Quarters, and Ottsville .- Fisheries .- Early taverns .- Area of township .- Population.
TINICUM is bounded by the Delaware river and Nockamixon on the north, the Delaware on the east, the Tohickon,1 which separates it from Plumstead and Bedminster, on the south, and by Nocka- mixon on the west. The area is seventeen thousand one hundred and seventy-seven acres.
1 From Tohickhan, or Tohickhanne, signifying the drift-wood stream, i. e. the stream we cross on drift-wood. Teedyuscung, the great Delaware king, frequently declared the Tohickon to be the northern limit of the white man's country, and that lands to the north of it had been taken from them fraudulently. On all the old records we have examined, it is spelled Tohickney.
500
HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
On the 6th of September, 1699, William Penn wrote to James Logan from Pennsbury : "I desire to see T. Fairman, for that I hear an Indian township called Tohickon, rich lands and much cleared by the Indians, he has not surveyed to mine and children's tracts as I expected. It joins upon the back of my manor of High- lands, and I am sorry my surveyor-general did not inform me thereof. If it be not in thy warrants, put it in, except lands already or formerly taken up, or an Indian township. The Indians have been with me about it." Penn was very cross that his surveyor had neglected to lay off the tract alluded to, to himself and children, which was afterward formed into an Indian township. We find, in our investigations, that somewhere " above the Highlands," but the exact location is not known, ten thousand acres were confirmed to John Penn and his children. This may have reference to the same tract, and probably the " Indian township" was part of what is now Tinicum.
The " London company " was among the very earliest land-owners in the township as well as the largest, and the purchase was prob- ably made about the time the company bought part of manor of Highlands in 1699. The courses and distances are given by John Watson, who probably surveyed it when broken up, as follows : " Beginning at a white oak by the river Delaware, thence running by vacant lands, south-west one thousand six hundred and sixty perches to a black oak ; thence by land laid out to said Proprietary's land, south-east six hundred and thirty-four perches to a post at the corner of John Streaper's land ; thence north-east by the said Streaper's land, one thousand one hundred and sixty perches to a white oak ; thence south-east by the said Streaper's land, six hundred and eighty perches to a black oak sapling, to the said river ; thence up the same on the several courses, one thousand six hundred and fifty-eight perches to the place of beginning, containing seven thousand five hundred acres." From these notes it is difficult to define the boundary at the present day. It had a frontage of about five miles on the Del- aware, extending back about the same distance, and occupied the northern part of the township. We have seen a copy of the draft made by Benjamin Eastburn, surveyor-general, in 1740, but its ac- curacy is doubted as the lines do not extend eastward to the river.
The stream of immigration that planted the Scotch-Irish on the banks of the Deep run, in Bedminster, carried settlers of the same race across the Tohickon, into the then wilderne s of Tinicum, in
501
HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
the first quarter of the last century. By abont 1730 we find settled there William, Edward and Moses Marshall, Moses and Joseph Collins, Joseph Haverford, Richard Thatcher, David Griffee, (Grif- fith), Richard Minturn, James Ross, John Hall, and James Willey, not one of whom was German. The actual date when each one of these immigrants settled in Tinicum, it is impossible to give, or the place and the quantity of land taken up. Edward Marshall, who made the " Great Walk " for the Penns in 1737, was an in- habitant of the township at the time, and during part of his residence there, made his home on an island in the Delaware, which still bears his name. In 1737 Matthew Hughes took up a tract in the lower part of the township, lying on the river road and extending back to the hills. In 1746 he granted forty acres to Adam Meisner, at the upper end of Point Pleasant, then called the Narrows. In 1759 Mr. Hughes gave fifty-four acres to his son Uriah. In 1739 Casper Kolb bought one hundred and fifty acres of the Proprietaries, which he sold in 1749 to Michael Heaney, who was probably the ancestor of the family of this name which now lives in the township. "In 1745 Heaney bought one hundred and fifty acres of patent land, described as "near Tohickon, Bucks county." John Praul, of Ben- salem, patented several hundred acres, extending from Point Pleasant up to Smithtown, and reaching a mile back from the river. John Van Fossen, a Hollander, was one of the carliest land-owners at the mouth of the Tohickon, his tract extending on the south side into Plumstead, on which Point Pleasant is built in part. A German named Christopher Sigman lived in Tinicum in 1750. There was still vacant land in the township in 1753, when thirty-two acres were surveyed to John Hart, under a warrant dated March 16th, 1750. A few of the Hessians captured at Trenton settled in Tinicum, and others in Williams and Saucon townships, Northampton county. The Wolfingers of Tinicum and neighboring townships are de- scended from Frederick Wolfinger, who came with his wife from Germany about 1750, and settled in Nockamixon, where he bought a tract of land near Kintnerville, now owned by John Ahlem and John Keyser. He had four sons and three daughters, who married into the families of Schick, Grover, Sassaman, Good, Hoffmann, and Scheetz, and left large families. The Lears of Tinicum are descended from ancestry who immigrated from Germany to Vir- ginia at an early day. From there Joseph Lear, the grandfather of Mahlon C. Lear, came to Bucks county and settled in Tinicum, near
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
Erwinna, where he died thirty years ago, at the age of ninety-two The family claim that Tobias Lear, the private secretary of General Washington, was a brother of the aforesaid Joseph Lear.
By 1738 the settlers in what is now Tinicum felt themselves numerous enough to ask for a township organization, and on the 12th of March we find William, Edward and Moses Marshall, Moses, Joseph and Jonathan Collins, Joseph Haverford, Richard Thatcher, David Griffee, (Griffith,) Richard Minturn, James Ross, John Hall, James Willey, James Stewart, Joseph M. King, Michael William- son, William Rickey, John McKee, John Peterson, James Briggs, James Campbell, John Stewart, James Johnston, John Shaw, William Hill, and Joseph McFarland, who styled themselves "di- vers inhabitants of the lands adjacent to Plumstead," petitioned the court of quarter sessions to erect the following district of country into a new township to be called "Tennicunk,"2 viz : "Beginning at the lower corner of Nockamixon, on the river Delaware, thence ex- tending by the same township southeast two thousand one hundred and forty perches to the Tohickon creek, thence down the said creek, by the townships of Bedminster and Plumstead, to the Delaware aforesaid, then up the said river to the place of beginning." The court does not seem to have hesitated, but allowed the township, which was soon afterward surveyed and organized. The original boundaries are retained to the present day. At the time the town- ship was laid out, there was probably but one grain-mill in it, Bar- croft's, on the Tohickon near its mouth. The township organization invited settlers, and immigrants seeking new homes flocked to the country north of the Tohickon, and gradually new farms were opened, dwellings erected, and roads laid out. The names on the petition for the erection of the township prove the early settlers to have been English and Scotch-Irish. The Germans were the in- troduction of a later immigration, and afterward many of this na- tionality found homes in Tinicum. We have no record of their advent, but they came soon after the township was settled. In 1762 we find the additional names of Herman Ronsecrout, Bernard Schneider, Samuel McConoghy, William Richards, Henry Newton, Jacob Fox, Robert Stovert, John Wallace, and Martin Fryling, three of which names are German. In 1738 Conrad Kuster took
2 The original name no doubt is Indian, and the present a corruption. It has been spelled several ways: "Tennicunk," in 1738, "Tenecum," in 1747, "Tennecunk," in 1749, and "Tenecunk," in 1750.
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
up one hundred and a half acres of land on a branch of Tinicum creek. Henry Stover resided in Tinicum in 1768, and Christian Honk and Nicholas Hern owned land there in 1769. In 1774 Jacob Kolb purchased two hundred and eleven acres in Tinicum.
The Williamses are descended from a Yankee ancestor, born in Boston, who removed to Wilmington, Delaware, and thence to Philadelphia, where he married. The great-great-grandfather of Hiram A. Williams purchased several hundred acres of John and Richard Penn. His son, Jeremiah Williams, purchased this tract of his father, and settled in the township with his family before the Revolutionary war, where they and their descendants have lived to the present time. Newbury D. Williams, formerly cashier of the Frenchtown bank, was a member of this family.
At this time Richard Stevens was the largest land-holder, owning four thousand one hundred and thirty-one acres, nearly one-fourth of the land in the township. The population was sparse.
We have met with the records of but few roads in Tinicum, the earliest being that of 1741, when the road was laid out from the mouth of Tinicum creek, near Erwinna, then known as "London ferry," to the mouth of Indian cabin run, where it crosses the To- hickon and meets the Durham road, near Hinkletown, in Plumstead. The Durham road was laid out through the township in 1745. In June, 1747, John Watson surveyed a road from London ferry, twelve miles and three hundred and sixty-seven and a half perches, until it met the Durham, probably a re-survey of the road that was laid out in 1741. About 1750 the inhabitants of Tinicum built, by subscription, a wooden bridge over Indian creek, near its mouth at the river. In 1768 the inhabitants of Tinicum, Nockamixon, Bed- minster and Plumstead asked permission of the court to build a stone bridge at their own expense, in place of the wooden one, but it was not granted. Among the petitioners are the names of George Hill- pot, William McIntyre, Michael Worman and Abraham Fretz, prob- ably the ancestors of the extensive families bearing these names in that section of the county. The bridge over the Tohickon, on the Durham road, was built in 1765, at an expense of £283. 16s. 10}d., of which the inhabitants contributed £101. 13s. 6d., and the balance was taken from the public funds. This crossing was called John Orr's ford, after the first settler at that place. The grand jury re- ported in favor of the bridge at the June term, 1763, but it was not to be built until the inhabitants raised as much money as they
504
HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
could toward the cost. At the same term it was reported that Tinicum, Bedminster and Plumstead had raised £84 by subscription. In 1767 a road was laid out from Erwinna to John Wilson's tavern, about half-way to the Brick church, and in 1774 one from Abra- ham Johnson's blacksmith shop, on the Durham road, to the Pres- byterian burying-ground. In 1786 the River road was extended up the river from Kugler's mill, below Lumberville, to the mouth of Durham creek, where it met that already laid out from Erwinna down to that crossing. The road from Erwin's mills to the Dur- ham road was opened in 1790.
Arthur Erwin was the largest land-owner in Tinicum at the close of the last century and for some time before. When the land of the London company was sold at public sale, about 1761, by trustees appointed by act of Parliament, it fell into the hands of various per- sons. Mr. Erwin purchased one thousand five hundred and sixty- eight acres and thirty-two perches, Robert Patterson three hundred and twenty-four, Andrew Patterson three hundred and twenty-two, and Robert Wilson one hundred and thirty-one acres. Mr. Erwin was of Scotch-Irish birth, and became a resident of the township prior to the Revolution. He represented this county in the assem- bly in 1785, and was assassinated at the house of Samuel McAfee, in Luzerne county, in the spring of 1791. At his death he owned two thousand acres in Tinicum, some in Durham, and twenty-five thousand acres in Steuben county, New York. His real estate was divided among his children, each one receiving over two thousand five hundred acres. He laid out the town of Erwinna in this county, and a town called Erwin was laid out on his land in Steuben county. At that time the family was the richest in the county, but it does not now own a foot of the ancestral acres. His son represented Bucks county in the assembly.
Eighty years ago there was in Tinicum a valuable industrial es- tablishment, founded by Joseph Smith, an ingenious and intelligent mechanic, a descendant of Robert Smith, an early settler of Buck- ingham. He was the son of Timothy and Sarah Smith, and great- grandson of Thomas Canby, one of the earliest settlers in Solebury. Joseph Smith was married at Wrightstown meeting September 11th, 1774, to Ann Smith, daughter of Samuel and Jane, of Buckingham, who was born November 11th, 1754. Their two male progenitors, Robert and William Smith, settled side by side in Buckingham and Upper Makefield, with the township line between them, which was
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
no barrier to the young people falling in love and marrying. Some of the Smiths, of Buckingham, went to Tinicum as early as the spring of 1777. In May, 1783, Robert Smith, Joseph Smith, Uriah Hughes, and Joseph Kinsey, all of Buckingham, entered into a co- partnership to erect an industrial establishment, to run by water. In 1784 Uriah Hughes was released at his own request, and his interest conveyed to Robert Smith. Joseph Smith, the moving spirit in this work, selected a forbidding spot on the bank of the Delaware, two and a half miles above Point Pleasant, where he caused to be erected four dwellings, grist and saw-mill, and smith and plow-shops, which gave employment to a number of men. The place took the name of Smithtown. The principal occupation was making plows and mould-boards. Joseph Smith was assisted by his sons, Mahlon, Jonas and Charles, and the father moved there in 1802. Joseph Smith made the first cast-iron mould-board in Penn- sylvania. It was the invention of his brother Robert, who took out a patent for it in 1800, but the idea had been in his mind for ten years, and Joseph had made them three years before the patent was ob- tained. In 1803 they shipped seven hundred and fifty-eight mould- boards to their factors in Philadelphia.
Joseph Smith introduced the use of hard coal in blacksmith-shops in Bucks county, and taught others how to use it. In 1812 he sent his sons, Charles and Jonas, the former now living near Pineville at the age of ninety, to Lehighton, for two wagon-loads of coal. One load was left at Smithtown to be used in the shops there, and the other was to be delivered to the three most noted blacksmiths in the county, Thomas Atkinson, of Wrightstown, then doing iron-work for a chain bridge, Benjamin Wood of Solebury, who followed smithing at Ruckman's, and Edmund Kinsey, of Milton, near Car- versville. They were unable to use the coal satisfactorily, and it took a good while to burn the load left at Smithtown. To keep the coal from chocking up the draft a nail-rod was fixed to the roller of the bellows, so that at every stroke the rod would run out of the tube into the fire and loosen up the coal. In December of that year Charles Smith, of Wrightstown, a son of Joseph, hauled thirty bush- els of hard coal from Smithtown to his shop. It burned well at first, but in ten minutes the fire went out in spite of all he could do. That load of coal lasted three years, and until his father had dis- covered, by experiment, how to burn the coal in smith-shops as it was burned at Wilkesbarre, but not until his son Jonas had invented
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
a fixture which kept the coal ignited, with the iron heated to any degree of heat. Hard coal now came into general use in forges, and charcoal was supplanted. Charles Smith is said to have used it in his smith-shop, successfully, as early as 1813. In the Pennsyl- vania Correspondent, of March, 1815, Joseph Smith, of Tinicum, publishes a card with directions how to construct a smith's fire to burn Lehigh coal in, and states that his own workmen can lay one- third more share-moulds in the same time with Lehigh than with charcoal. Jacob B. Smith, of New Hope, and Edmund Kinsey, of Milton, certify to the truth of what he says, and Kinsey adds, "that twenty-two pounds of Lehigh coal will go as far as thirty-three pounds of Richmond, or soft coal." Lehigh coal then cost twenty- four dollars a ton, and its use was thought to be economy. Joseph Smith died suddenly, at the house of a relative in Solebury, on his return home from a visit to his daughter, September 28th, 1826, at the age of seventy-three. His widow died in 1854, aged one hundred years.
Joseph Smith was a man of great activity and intelligence, strong mind and liberal views, and a philanthropist in the best sense of the word, and deserves to be remembered among the benefactors of his race. He learned the mechanical trade of his father, and was the first man to make a plow in Bucks county, and probably in the United States, that was worth any thing. His improvements in this valuable implement of husbandry secured him the confidence of Thomas Jefferson, and entitles him to the thanks of the agricultural community. Among his good deeds may be mentioned the intro- duction of clover-seed into Bucks county, and the use of plaster of Paris on land, which have proved a source of great wealth. He left fifty-nine living grandchildren at his deatlı. His consistency as a Friend brought him into trouble during the stormy period of the Revolution, and he was arrested on two occasions, once being con- fined a prisoner in the American camp, and once in the Newtown jail. While in jail his wife visited him twice a week, regularly, with provisions, traveling the distance sixteen miles, there and back, on horseback, alone.
After Joseph Smith's death, the plow-works were carried on by his sons, Mahlon, Jonas and Charles, until 1840; and by Mahlon at that and other places until 1870, who is still living in Tinicum, upward of ninety years of age. He made an improvement in the mould-board after the patent was taken out, and the new pattern
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
was followed for years, but never patented. The mills and most of the workshops were destroyed by digging the Delaware canal, and Smithitown, except in name, has ceased to exist.
Of the islands in the Delaware opposite this township, the joint commissioners of Pennsylvania and New Jersey confirmed three to Tinicum in 1786, and one to New Jersey. Of these islands we know but little. Cutbush, or Cutbitch as it is called by some, and Gondola islands, near Point Pleasant, and containing about seventy - acres, belong to John N. Solliday. They were once owned by John Praul, and also by the state. In 1769 Jonathan Quinby sold Cutbush to Adam Hall, of Amwell, New Jersey, for £55. The third, opposite the mouth of Tinicuin creek, is called Marshall's island, containing one hundred and twenty acres, and is owned by Isaac and Jacob Stover. The fourth, known as Ridge's island, be- longs to New Jersey. There was considerable controversy about the islands belonging to Tinicum a century ago. Jonathan Quinby claimed the two lower, but it was alleged that he sold the upper one to one Rittenhouse for two or three ears of corn, and that George Wall had purchased Rittenhouse's right for a few bushels of buck- wheat. John Praul quieted Quinby's claim by purchasing his right. The grant is supposed to have been made by Penn to one Mills, Mills to Marshall, part of Marshall's heirs to Quinby, who claimed that he obtained a warrant for his right, and laid it on the two islands granted to Adam Hall.
The rifle which Edward Marshall carried for many years of his life is now owned and in the possession of Edward Ridge, of Tinicum, a descendant in the female line. The Ridge homestead is on the River road, three miles above Point Pleasant, to which we made a visit to inspect the famous weapon. We found it a long, heavy, flint-lock gun, with wooden rammer and brass mountings, and it carries an ounce ball. As Mr. Marshall could not get a rifle in this country to suit him, he caused a barrel and lock to be pur- chased in Germany, and had it mounted here. On the top of the barrel are the following letters, faintly seen : I A. D. ROTHEN- BERG. The rifle is in perfect order, and the hair trigger as sensi- tive to the touch as when the original owner set it to shoot Indians. In the flint-box is the identical rammer-screw that Marshall used to clean out the piece an hundred and fifty years ago, before he started on a hunt for human game. It is doubtful whether any firearın in existence has shed so much human blood as this old rifle. The
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HISTORY OF BUCKS COUNTY.
house is apparently as old as the rifle, but the situation is one of the most delightful along the river. The great hunter, walker and deer-killer was buried in what is known as Marshall's graveyard, a mile north-east of Head-Quarters.
There are four churches in the township, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Reformed, Christian, and Baptist. That known as the Timicum Presbyterian church is the oldest of that denomination north of' Deep run, and probably as old as that. At what time it was organ- ized we do not know, but in the summer of 1739 the Reverend James Campbell preached there and at Newtown. In the fall of that year, he received a call to this church, then called Tohickon, through Francis Williamson and John Orr, but he continued to supply his two congregations, occasionally going up to the Forks until 1744, when he was installed at Tohickon, May 24th. A few years after- ward it was decided to build a new church, and a controversy arose whether it should be built on the site of the old one, or at Red Hill. It was fixed at the latter place, on account of which Mr. Campbell resigned in May, 1749. He afterward went to North Carolina, and died after 1780. The records of the church are missing down to 1762, and we know nothing of its history during the intervening period. The 16th of February, of that year the London company conveyed thirteen acres and four perches to William Wear, of Spring- field, and John Heaney and James Patterson, of Tinicum, for the use of the church. In 1767 the latter conveyed it to Robert Ken- nedy and James Blair, of Springfield, James McKee, Robert Smith, James McGlauchlin, and James Bailey, of Tinicum, and Nicholas Patterson and Alexander McCannon, of Nockamixon, in trust for the Protestant congregation of Tinicum and adjoining townships.
The records are again silent until 1785, when their pastor, Alex- ander Mitchel, left them. By consent of the Presbytery, the con- gregations of Deep Run and Tinicum were united in one charge in 1785, under the Reverend James Grier, who served to near the close of 1787. The meeting-house and burial-ground were enclosed in 1786, and the same year £46. 2s. were subscribed to pay Mr. Grier, and £44. 16s. 11d. in 1787, to be paid in specie. The church was incorporated March 28th, 1787. Among the supplies for 1788 we find the names of Blair, Hannah, Peppard, and Nathaniel Irwin. In 1792 the church gave a call to the Reverend Nathaniel Snowden, and in 1798, after he was installed at Deep Run, Reverend Uriah DuBois was invited to give Tinicum one-third of his time. In 1820
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