a history of devon - Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society

A HISTORY OF DEVON
C. Herbert Fry
vania. Since this land was not actively
marketed, it lay dormant and was the
last part of Easttown to be developed.
Easttown Township, where the Devon
development took place in the
nineteenth century, is celebrating its
tercentenary year in 2004. The first
known reference to Easttown appeared
in records of the Chester County court
when William Thomas was appointed
its constable on December 27, 1704.
The History of Chester County,
Pennsylvania, by J. Smith Futhey and
Gilbert Cope, published in 1881, states:
"[Easttown] was doubtless so named on
account of its position [relative to the
county seat in Chester]. Its territory
was included in the original survey
made for the Welsh, and it was settled
by them." However, the Easttown
Welsh were Church of England, not
Quakers. Their church, Old St. David's
constructed in 1715, lies just outside the
borders of Easttown in Newtown
Township.
Finally, the 1000 acres was disposed of
as one lot, and on June 8, 1740, John
Wightman sold it to Richard Harrison.
He devised it by will to his son Samuel
in 1746, and Samuel himself passed on
780 acres in 1774 to his sister, Hannah,
who had married Charles Thomson,
secretary of the Continental Congress,
and to his nieces Amelia and Mary
Harrison.
According to local historian Franklin
Burns writing in the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club Quarterly:
The Harrisons of Herring
Creek, Maryland, were people
of substance. Richard Harrison, an English Quaker, married in Philadelphia, 1717,
Hannah, daughter of Judge
Isaac Norris and granddaughter of Deputy Governor,
Thomas Lloyd. Shortly after
their marriage the bridal party
were robbed by river pirates of
goods and chattels they were
bringing north. Isaac Norris
gave them the use of his town
house for a time.
The "First Purchasers" of Easttown
land were three English speculators,
William Shadow, William Wood, and
James Claypoole, who owned the entire
township in the 1680s; about 5000
acres ripe for settlement. The strip of
1000 acres along the eastern border
next to Radnor and Tredyffrin,
stretching from the early road to
Philadelphia on the north to the
Newtown line on the south, was owned
by Sharlow, a prosperous Quaker
merchant, who died in 1704 near
London without ever visiting Pennsyl-
In 1719 Richard Harrison purchased the
manor house erected about 1704 by
Rowland Ellis and called "Bryn Mawr"
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after his home in Wales. Harrison
renamed it "Harriton" and there he
lived and died in the mansion which
has since become one of the most
historic and attractive show places
along the Main Line. The Harrisons
were said to be related to General
William Henry Harrison, ninth President of the United States. Charles
Thomson later made Harriton his
home.
pike, and that it was the home of
Following the War for Independence, a
new Pennsylvania constitution was
enacted. The area we know as Devon
was largely uninhabited and traversed
only by the Conestoga Road connecting
Philadelphia with Lancaster. As it went
west, the road ascended the hill to the
spine of the ridge running roughly
along the northern border of Easttown
where it meets Tredyffrin. It was, however, a road in need of repair and
improvement.
Patrick McGuigan. Also, a newspaper
report tells of the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) historic marker
survey in 1934. The tea room had
closed a year before. The WPA traced a
log cabin on the property back to at
least 1850, when Eliza Ann and Patrick
Williams were married and moved into
it. A researcher for the Chester County
Historical Society in the 1950s learned
that the cabin may have been
completely reconstructed in 1914, a
project presided over by local architect
Brognard Okie. An automobile repair
garage has stood next to the cabin since
then. Wallace Nutting's 1924 book,
Pennsylvania Beautiful, shows the
cabin on page 129.
An Act of the Assembly passed in 1792
incorporated a private enterprise, the
Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike
Company, and gave it authority to
construct a toll road connecting the
nation's new capital with the rich
farming area at Lancaster. The new
turnpike passed less than a hundred
yards to the south of the old road, and
also traversed the Harrison lands. We
know the turnpike then constructed as
Old Lancaster Road today. Two old
houses which date to the days before
the Revolution can still be seen in this
corner of Devon.
Two blocks further east, facing west on
Valley Forge (Baptist) Road at the
turnpike, was a small stone Welsh
farmhouse, the first unit of today's
larger house. It was likely built several
years prior to 1763, which is the date
chiseled into the date block in the
chimney of the adjoining west wing.
Jenkin Lewis, a weaver, paid taxes
there about 1750.
The small log structure now known as
the Devon Tea House along Old Lancaster Road is reputed to date to 1734.
According to Franklin Burns, there is
the tradition that it once sheltered the
blacksmith or wheelwright who had his
shop on the opposite side of the turn-
Robert McClenachan, late of Ireland,
styled a Philadelphia merchant, married
Amelia Harrison who had inherited the
Harrison land in what we today call
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between 1805 and 1812. John Lewis
was the first tavern landlord in 1813,
followed by Jacob Clinger from 1815 to
1830, and then Henry Clinger for a
short time, after which it ceased as an
inn.
north Devon. About 1800, shortly after
completion of the turnpike through this
property, McClenachan laid out on paper
the new town of Glassley with wide
streets, squares, and lots on the tract
reaching from about today's Warren
Avenue in Berwyn to Devon State Road
in Devon.
The second inn, The Stage Coach (later
part of the lawn of George D.
Woodside's mansion in Devon) was
owned by Dr. John Havard Davis in
1810. The first landlord was John
Pugh. Then followed John Lewis until
he secured a similar position at The
Lamb. Alexander E. Finley took over at
the Stage between 1826 and 1833. He
was a Scotch-Irishman of some political
influence. Finley subsequently owned
the property and leased it to the last
landlord, a German named Sheneman.
It dropped lower and lower on the
scale, with rough and tumble fights and
brawls being a nightly occurrence. The
coming of the Philadelphia and
Columbia Railroad, in the 1830s, an
undertaking of the state "Main Line of
Public Works," diverted traffic from the
turnpike road and doomed the inns.
One of the first dwellings in the town was
erected of logs by Abel Lewis about 1801
and in later years became known as the
Gamble house. Further west, another
house of logs was occupied by three
generations of Taylors. According to
Franklin Burns, it was reached by a
lane opening into the turnpike and had
five gates. The Pennsylvania Railroad
eventually purchased the house to do
away with a dangerous private grade
crossing. But beautiful Glassley never
really became a town.
It had no
industry to attract prospective residents.
There were, moreover, two inns along
the Lancaster Turnpike here. Of the
new hostelries, The Lamb (now
The tavern signs of both The Lamb and
The Stage were said to be the work of a
self-taught genius, James McGuigan, of
Glassley.
Finley, a bachelor, died without a will
on August 8, 1850. His considerable
property, including the Inn, was
advertised for sale at public vendue on
October 26, 1850 by his sister,
appointed by the court as administrator
to settle his estate. The Inn itself was
not sold that day for lack of a sufficient
bid, but later, in December, at a second
auction described in the advertisement
below, the old Stage Coach Inn was
sold:
Roughwood, a private residence listed
on the National Register of Historic
Places in 1984), at the corner of the
turnpike and Baptist Road, was built
about 1805 by George Rees who was
later sheriff of Philadelphia. A country
store was kept there by Jonathan Jones
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ADMINISTRATOR'S SALE
PURSUANT to an order of the Orphans' Court of Chester County, will
be sold at public sale, on the premises, on THURSDAY, the 14th day of
December 1850, all that valuable REAL ESTATE, known as the STAGE
TAVERN PROPERTY, late of Alexander E. Findley, deceased, situate in
Easttown township, in said county, containing 11 ACRES of arable land,
in a good state of cultivation. The improvements are a two-story stone
Dwelling House, 36 by 54 feet; a two-story Frame Dwelling; a Stone
Livery Stable, 27 by 5O feet; an extensive range of Stone Sheds,
Wheelwright Shop, and Blacksmith Shop, calculated to do an extensive
business in a Popular and respectable neighborhood. There are two
wells of excellent soft water, near the doors of the dwellings. The
Lancaster turnpike passes through the property, which is within view of
the Columbia Railroad, and is equally desirable to the man of leisure or
the industrious mechanic. Sale at 1 o'clock, P. M., when terms will be
made known by
DAVID WILSON
HENRY T.EVANS
November 19,1850
Attorney in fact for
Mary E. Findley
Land acquisition continued through the
summer of that year, and in August the
news reporter stated further that a
large hotel was planned for the site
"similar in its appointments to the one
at Bryn Mawr." In addition, the writer
disclosed, "The new town is to be called
Devon and indications are that in a few
years it will not be surpassed in beauty
by any similar place along the Pennsylvania Railroad."
Eber Beaumont was the winning bidder.
At or about the same time he also bought
over 100 adjacent acres lying to the north
of the Inn stretching down the north face
of the South Valley hills toward the valley.
He was a farmer and a long time Easttown
resident having previously lived near Old
St. David's Church. After his death in
1878, the family sold the property to
Coffin and Altemus.
The defining event in the history of what
we today know as Devon was reported by
an unidentified writer in the July 5, 1881
edition of West Chester's Daily Local
News. "Coffin & Altemus," the writer
said, "who recently purchased 400 acres
of land near the proposed new Eagle
station on the Pennsylvania Railroad, are
making arrangements to build a large
town at that point." The partners in the
land venture, Lemuel Coffin and Joseph
B. Altemus, were dry goods commission
merchants on Chestnut Street in
Philadelphia.
Still later that year mention was made
that John Kauffman, Esq., surveyor of
Berwyn, had just completed laying out
the grounds in lots from 2 1/2 to 5acres—there were initially 104 of
them—with avenues 50 feet wide and
500 feet apart running through them.
From north to south the project
extended from the Philadelphia and
Lancaster Turnpike above the railroad
to Devon (Sugartown) Avenue and from
Valley Forge (County Line) Avenue on
the east to beyond Fairfield Avenue on
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Map of the Beaumont property. Sketch made by Elbert W. Lapp, c. 1893. The
Stage Tavern was in the area of Old Lancaster Road and the Beaumont loop road,
possibly where the X is on this map. North is at the bottom.
the west. In addition, it was said that
Mr. Charles Paiste had been appointed
superintendent of the operations being
carried on by Messrs. Coffin & Altemus.
famous Devon Inn. It was primarily of
the Queen Anne style, with a superstructure of stone and the rest of wood.
Most rooms were double the size of
those in other hotels, some with 16-foot
ceilings. It opened for the first season
six months later on August 16. As the
Early the next year, on February 11,
1882, ground was broken for the
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guests departed that first season, on
October 21 the Pennsylvania Railroad
announced it would build a new and
elegant passenger station on a site
opposite the Inn, approximately 100
yards west of the one then in service.
A post office opened in Devon on May
25, 1883 in a building along the south
side of the railroad just east of Valley
Forge Road with William Reed Lewis
serving as first postmaster. When the
new station was finished, the post office
moved there and Lewis lived with his
family in the upper floor of the
building.
He left the position in
January of 1887 to accept an appointment by President Grover Cleveland as
U. S. Consul to Tangiers, Morocco.
Above: Porch Cafe at the Devon Inn. c.
1908. Below: View looking north from the
Devon Inn down wide Devon Boulevard to
the Devon Railroad Station, c. 1909.
The year 1883 was not without its
problems for the developers.
In
August, the Inn was totally destroyed
by fire with no loss of life. Rising out of
the ashes, it became even grander, this
time built of stone and brick. Larger
than the original, it now had four
People were also buying lots and
constructing summer homes nearby,
and the development gained strong
headway. So much so, in fact, that in
1885 a small establishment called the
Wynburne Inn rose in what had once
stories and was longer than a football
field. All this took place in time to open
the next year's season about a week
after Memorial day. Local historian
Julius Sachse said, "Devon had 250
guests. Among them was one lady who
brought with her nine horses and nine
vehicles, consisting of carriages of
various kinds, and quite a retinue of
servants."
been Glassley on the foundations of
Joseph C. Smith's barn. George H.
Earle Jr. and his family lived in Devon
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when their son George H. Earle III was
born in 1890. He became governor of
Pennsylvania in 1935; a native son of
Easttown.
good horse and rig to get them back and
forth to the station. Horses were a great
preoccupation, much as automobiles are
today. This led to the formation of the
Devon Horse Show Association where
the horses could be shown and judged.
The first show was held for two days in
July of 1896.
Since there was no
grandstand, it was "standing room only."
The horse show has been held every year
since, except 1901 to 1909 and for short
periods during World Wars I and II.
Today it is a premiere world-class sporting event.
Coffin & Altemus donated a site on
Berkley Road for a Sunday School, and
in 1893 a group headed by J. Lewis
Twadell erected a small frame building
called Devon Chapel. It grew to become
the full-fledged St. John's Presbyterian
Church in 1903. The women of the
church were especially active, helping
with the developing Italian community
in the Devon area. The immigrants
worked as gardeners on estates and in
local quarries. They were invited to use
St. John's for worship on Saturday
evenings until they acquired their own
church in Strafford where Our Lady of
the Assumption parish was established
in 1908.
Devon has been blessed with a number of
men with a combination of sporting
blood and altruism. William T. Hunter,
who lived on "Plan of Devon, Lot 27" on
Waterloo Road near Arlington (now
Lancaster) Avenue, was one of the
town's most outstanding citizens. In fact,
he was known as "Honorary Mayor" of
Devon. Although a banker by vocation,
he gave almost equal time to the affairs
of the nascent village. In 1910 when the
Devon Horse Show resumed at the polo
field, it was said that "much of the credit
for its revival was due to the untiring
efforts of William T. Hunter," who was
treasurer of the organization and later its
chairman. He was also the moving force
behind the operation of the Devon
Drainage Association until his death in
1933. Hunter's generosity, for children
especially, came with the swimming pool
he built on the western edge of his
property, simply called "Hunters."
Unadorned and free, children from
Wayne to Paoli, often accompanied by
parents, learned to swim there.
By 1895 Devon was a village of over
thirty houses, in addition to the Inn.
That year Lemuel Coffin died, and it
took 3 1/2 years to sort out his partnership interest with Joseph B.
Altemus and find a buyer for the unsold
lands.
Edward T. Stotesbury and
James W. Paul Jr. of the Drexel
investment bank were the buyers in
1898 of the Devon estate, which then
stretched all the way west to the Ivester
tract on the Darby Creek tributary
south of Berwyn.
At the time the Inn was built, Joseph
Altemus had a polo field laid out
nearby. His son, Lemuel Coffin Altemus, would be one of the players. The
story is told of the day George Gould,
son of financier Jay Gould, arrived at
Devon with his team which trounced
the local opposition.
By the second decade of the twentieth
century, transportation opportunities
had improved greatly. Long distance
travel
by
train
became
more
comfortable.
The automobile had
established itself as an economic force
Newcomers to Devon were locating
further from the railroad and needed a
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break. At the end of the grade, the
engineer slowed his speed, but the
detached cars came thundering down
the grade and plunged into the forward
section, completely demolishing 15 cars
and strewing debris over the 4 tracks,
blocking the way completely. Two oil
tanks filled with petroleum took fire.
For 4 hours the piled up cars and their
freight burned fiercely. There were
only two casualties, fortunately, two
tramps who were stealing a ride in one
of the cars with the oil tanks.
to be reckoned with. Automobile
production in the United States
surpassed an aggregate of one million
cars—statistics show 450,000 registered
automobiles in 1912. Guests who had
spent their summers at Devon began to
find new destinations, such as the
nearby New Jersey seashore, the Poconos, or even Maine.
The automobile brought an end to the
glorious days of the Devon Inn. In April
1914 owners John W. and Ellen
Simmons Patten sold the Inn and about
14 acres of ground. For a while the
building was occupied by the Devon
Manor School for Girls. In 1926 it
reopened as the Devon Park Hotel for
two years, and, after remodeling, it
became the Valley Forge Military
Benjamin C. Betner, a former partner of
Thomas M. Royal in a paper converting
business, opened a plant of his own at
the southwest corner of the Turnpike
and Grove Avenue in 1927. It had been
the old Clayton A. Lobb Planing Mill.
At that time only a path existed on the
south side of the railroad between
Grove Avenue and Valley Forge Road
further west, as the new Lancaster
Avenue highway was not put through
until later in the year. Many of the
recent immigrants from Italy who took
up residence in Devon worked at the
Betner factory.
Academy, with Captain Milton Baker as
the superintendent. It had a staff of 13
and 117 cadets. A few months later, on
January 18, 1929, a disastrous fire
swept through the old building and
totally destroyed it. The famous and
well-known landmark, the old Devon
Inn, was no more.
Another industry had grown up in
Devon at this time. Located in Tredyffrin on the north side of the Turnpike,
north of the railroad, just east of the
Easttown line, it manufactured fireworks. Alexander Vardaro started the
business on a small scale in 1918 and by
1930 the plant, known as the Pennsylvania Fireworks Display Company, Inc.,
had expanded to include a total of 14
metal and frame buildings used for
manufacturing and the storage of
ingredients and finished products.
Three devastating explosions, in quick
succession, took place at the plant a few
minutes past ten o'clock on the morning of Thursday, April 3, 1930. Ten
people were killed and scores of others
Devon had seen its share of grief over
the years, and more was to come. A
frightful train wreck took place on the
Pennsylvania Railroad main line in the
early morning of August 23, 1888,
between Devon and Strafford. A heavily
loaded east-bound freight on the grade
west of Devon, and running at a high
rate of speed, was divided by a coupling
10
were injured. Noise from the blast was
reported to have been heard for fifty
miles—in places as far away as Trenton,
where the windows in the State House
were rattled, and Wilmington.
phia and the increase of suburban commuters and commuter trains, caused
the railroad to develop plans to relieve
congestion at its Philadelphia passenger terminal, Broad Street Station.
This resulted in the electrification of
the Paoli Local in 1915, complete with
an overhead catenary of wires and tubular steel poles.
Much physical damage occurred in the
neighborhood of the wrecked plant.
The overhead wires of the Pennsylvania
Railroad were knocked down across the
tracks interrupting service. At the Betner Company nearby, over 1700 panes
of glass were reported shattered and
the steel window sashes recently added
to the building were all blown out.
Residences along Old Lancaster Road,
across from the fireworks company or
adjacent to it, suffered significant damage, including the homes of Stephen
Fuguett, once The Lamb Tavern, and
John Cornelius, the Peter Latch house
or Sprucemont. Many other homes in
Devon sustained damage.
But, alas, just as the railroad superseded the Conestoga wagon and the
Lancaster Turnpike, the automobile
superseded commuting by rail. After
World War II, the Pennsylvania Railroad was struggling and looked for
regeneration in a merger with the New
York Central Railroad. The combination took place on February 1, 1968.
The merged Penn Central filed for
bankruptcy on June 21, 1970, leading to
the takeover of long distance passenger
trains by AMTRAK in 1971 and the
Philadelphia commuter lines by SEPTA
in 1972.
The response of the community to the
needs of the victims of the disaster was
both immediate and outstanding. The
Disaster Committee of the Wayne
Branch of the American Red Cross took
an important part in alleviating the
suffering. It was a true community
effort in the face of what was one of the
worst disasters ever experienced in our
local area.
The lovely Victorian homes erected
in Devon a hundred years ago have
aged well. Some of the larger ones
have been featured recently by the
Philadelphia Vassar Club on their
annual Scholar-ship Fund "Show
House and Gardens" tour event.
The five Devon homes selected are a
cross section of our best local
streetscapes:
The Pennsylvania Railroad is irretrievably linked to the emergence of Devon
and the development of that part of
Easttown Township. It became the
successor to the Philadelphia and
Columbia Railroad which it purchased
in 1857, and its subsequent efforts to
promote traffic through encouragement
of suburban living led in no small way
to the emergence of the Coffin & Altemus planned community here.
Grey Craig, built for James W.
Patterson in 1902,
Rosedon, built as "Oxmoor" for
William C. Bullitt in 1903,
D'Orsay, built for Baron Rodolphe
de Schauensee in 1926,
Hilltop, built as "Idlewood Farm" for
W. N. Wilbur about 1900, and
Pennview, built for Edmund B.
MaCarthy in 1906.
By the early 1900s, the growth of the
suburban population around Philadel-
11
Futhey, J. Smith and Gilbert Cope. History
of Chester County, Pennsylvania. (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881).
A Devon landmark home on Waterloo
Road known as "Oaklands" built in
1905 for Philadelphia financier, C.
Hartman Kuhn, was demolished in
2002 to make way for a 10-lot subdivision and new homes. The loss was
keenly felt as the house was designed
by famed Philadelphia Art Museum
architect Horace Trumbauer.
Since
1955 it had been occupied by a religious
order, and was known locally as the
Regina Mundi Priory.
Goshorn, Bob. "The Devon Horse Show."
Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 3 (July 1994), pp.
101-114.
. "Devon Inn." Quarterly, vol. 22,
no. 4 (October 1984), p.125-138.
. "When the Fireworks Factory in
Devon Blew Up." Quarterly, vol. 16, no 3
(Fall 1978), p.57-63.
Life in the suburban community of
Devon today is complicated by traffic
on Lancaster Avenue—no longer named
Arlington, as envisioned by Coffin &
Altemus. Banking offices occupy three
of the four corners at its principal intersection. But only one block removed
the old houses remain, as always, and
one can yet perceive the good life as it
once was lived here.
Goshorn, Robert M. and Robert E. Geasey. "The Electrification of the Paoli
Local." Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 4 (October
1996), p. 127-140.
McCarthy, Kelly. "The Devon Garage Tea
Room." Main Line Times, September 17
1998.
Raftery, Kay. "There are Chinks in Cabin's
History." The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 22, 1991.
Sources
Buehler, Marian S. "Sprucemont : A Colonial Era House on Old Lancaster Road in
Devon." Tredyffrin Easttown History Club
Quarterly (hereafter referred to as Quarterly), vol. 39, no. 2 (April 2001), p. 54.
Herb Fry has written numerous articles for
the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club Quarterly and is a past President of the Club.
He is a long-time resident of Easttown
Township.
Burns, Franklin L. "The Story of the Glassley Commons." Quarterly, vol.5, no. 3
(1943), p. 50-59.
Presented at the October 2003 meeting of
the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club.
Creutzburg, Carol. "A History of Devon."
The Suburban and Wayne Times, November 2, 2000.
Fry, C. Herbert. Easttown : Old in History,
Young in Spirit, 1704-2004. (Devon:
ANRO Printing, 2004).
Fry, Herb. "The Benjamin C. Betner Company." Quarterly, vol 31, no. 3 (July 1993),
p. 87-102.
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