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Monday, July 31, 2017

A Shooting in 19th Century Christiana Hundred

I'm thrilled and proud to present another fantastic guest post, this time from a first-time contributor, Don Prather. Don is a Delaware native (and current Arizonan) and a descendant of the Woodward family (among many others). He presents here a fascinating story that I personally was unfamiliar with prior to reading this well-researched and written article. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did, and many thanks to Don for this wonderful contribution.


Introduction

One thing I’ve learned from my ancestry research over the years is the fact that most of those who have come before me have lived lives as ordinary as mine. Over the centuries and through the generations, their lives were filled with many of the same joys and pains experienced by people living today. Given the chance to describe the important events in their own lives, our ancestors would likely highlight the same sorts of events as we would: finding true love, the birth of a child, the loss of a family member, an increase (or loss) of property, a close friendship. These are things that, for the individual, are extraordinary within the context of their own life but in a broader sense are an ordinary part of the human condition.

Still, finding a new and undiscovered detail about the life of an ancestor or someone who lived long ago in the community, no matter how “ordinary” that detail may be in the larger scheme of things, gives the ardent researcher a real sense of satisfaction. Once in a great while, I come across something in my research that is completely unexpected and makes me say, “Wow! That’s surprising”.  It could be a fact from a vital document, a news article, a property record, or a picture of person or location from a different angle that helps me understand the time or place more deeply and richly than before.

Recently, I was paging through old newspaper articles researching my Woodward ancestors and I stumbled across a story that caught my attention in this way. The story involves Aaron Klair Woodward, a son (one of a long list of sons and daughters) of Joseph Woodward and Mary Klair, both of Delaware.  Aaron, who was the brother of my third great-grandmother Hannah Woodward Armstrong, lived his entire life in rural New Castle County from his birth in 1836 until his passing in 1904, most of it in Christiana Hundred. The event in question occurred in October, 1874 and surely had a profound impact on Aaron and his family’s life, the lives of six young men from Wilmington, and especially the family of one William Lukens, a teenage boy whose family lived in Wilmington. At the time of the incident, Aaron Woodward and his wife, Mary Ann Woodward, nee Stidham (daughter of Gilpin Stidham) were parents of an eight year old boy and a fourteen week old baby boy. Their family lived on a farm of about 100 acres a few miles outside the city boundary along today’s Faulkland Road. As a result of this tragic event, a young man barely 18 years of age would lose his life and an ordinary farmer with a young family would somehow find himself on trial, fighting for his own life.

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

The Thomas Little House and the Old Hollingsworth Plantation

There are, thankfully, a number of historic homes still in use in and around Hockessin. Few of them, however, touch as many of the major area families as one that's celebrating its bicentennial this year -- the Thomas Little House. And luckily for us -- partially due to my research, but in large part due to an older work -- the history of the house and of the property it anchored can be related in detail, dating back to the earliest days of English habitation in the Hockessin Valley.

Located on the northeast corner of Old Wilmington Road and Meeting House Road (across from the Hockessin Friends Meeting), the Thomas Little House sits in a beautiful, shaded, quiet part of Hockessin, far enough removed from the hustle and bustle of nearby Lancaster Pike. The gorgeous four-bay, partially stuccoed field stone house sits facing south, but for most of its history the property it commanded was to the northeast, up along the Old Public Road. And that tract can be easily traced back to its original warrant from William Penn's daughter almost three centuries ago.