Kennett Square, PA I (7/25/2020)

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Originally inhabited by the Lenape Indians, Kennett Square was part of the land grant given by William Penn to his children, William, Jr and Letitia. It was first settled in 1686, mostly by English Quakers. The Borough of Kennett Square was a little over one square mile when it was incorporated in 1855.

We followed the Historic Kennett Square Walking Tour.

But first a stop in Chadds Ford, PA.

John Chad's Springhouse (c 1725, by stonemason John Wyeth, Jr)
and Barn (1991, on the foundation of a dairy barn)

John Chad inherited 500 acres along the Brandywine River. In 1763 he began a ferrying service, which continued until 1827 when a bridge was built.

John Chad's House (1725, by John Wyeth, Jr - not related to the
artist family) is made with Brandywine bluestone 

Elizabeth Chad's beehive oven

Lichen-covered wood fence (KSS)

Historic Kennett Square Walking Tour:

119 E Linden St/Brosius House (1870, Federal style with updated
Italianate details such as the wrought-iron supported porch on the left)

Instead of the WPA 1939 former municipal building on the corner of Linden and N Broad Streets, there was an extension of the parking garage! So what happened to Old Ben Butler? (Answer later.)

219 E Linden St/Walls House (built as a parsonage) was the home of
Dr Orville R Walls, a noted black physician, who graduated from
Meharry Medical School in Nashville, TN in 1936

301 E Linden St/Bethel AME Church (1895) retains
its Federal style steeple

309 E Linden St/New Garden Memorial UAME Church (1910-1911)
was built from the stone of the original 1850 church, which
burned down around the turn of the 20C due to reported
“white lightning,” also known as the Ku Klux Klan

315 E Linden St/Vincent Barnard House (c 1885); Barnard was a
"naturalist, botanist, ornithologist, entomologist, taxidermist,
mineralogist, artisan, and universal genius," who had a 2-acre garden

317 E Linden St/Elisha Harvey House (c 1885)

201 E State St/Kennett Square Inn (c 1820-1839; the inn was
established in 1835) started as a two-bay Penn plan, which
included one window and one door on the front elevation

Apple Alley and Marshall Street parking lot used to be the
Quaker Cemetery with the library and post office in the background
on the site of the original State Street Friends Meeting House

120 S Marshall St/Hicks-Schmaltz House/Borough Hall (1899,
by George Barber in Queen Anne style for Harry K Hicks)
was later owned by Hermann Schmaltz, a German, who ran
a hardware, plumbing and heating business

Kent found Old Ben Butler in front of Brough Hall!

In 1861, Bayard Taylor presented the home guard of Kennett Square with a cannon cast at the Pennock Foundry at State and Willow Streets. It was fired to hail Union victories during the Civil War, and became known as Old Ben Butler after a controversial Union general who was, like many of the Quakers around Kennett Square, strongly opposed to slavery. (There is also a cannon with the same nickname utilized during the conflict which sits on the campus of the University of Rhode Island, because General Butler was from RI.)

211 Marshall St/Sharpless Lewis House (1940 in Stick style);
stucco now covers the wood of the second floor

222 Marshall St/Roberts House (c 1880, in Gothic Stick style),
notable for the gambrel cross gable with decorative pendant)

The owner of this house realized we were taking the
walking tour, as she was on her way to the swimming pool

221 Marshall St/Eli & Lewis Thompson House (c 1882 in Gothic style)

Eli Thompson was the father-in-law of William Swayne, who with Harry Hicks built the first mushroom house in Kennett Square in 1885. Kennett Square is now the Mushroom Capital of the World!

219 S Broad St/Chandler House (1879, in Second Empire style)

Can you see the three distinct slate patterns -
diamond, brick, and fish scale?

216 S Broad St/McMullen-Walton House (1869) with
decorative trusses in the gables in a rising sun design

213 S Broad St/Presbyterian Manse (c 1890, in Stick style) (KSS)

The Presbyterian Manse had a Pop-Up Porch Gallery (KSS)

210 S Broad St/Westminster House (former Lutheran Church, now part
of the Kennett Square Presbyterian Church) with modified buttresses

307 S Broad St/Gregg House (1900 in Queen Anne style)
with a remarkable gable-roofed dormer with recessed porch

313 S Broad St/Kennett Square Academy (1870)
was established by Swithin Shortlidge in 1869

In 1874, Shortlidge moved the academy to Media, PA. After his wife died in 1890, he remarried in 1893. However, six weeks later he shot his new wife; during the trial a plea of insanity was entered, due to mental lapses suffered by Shortlidge from the grippe/flu.

Next: Kennett Square II.