The Eastburn Homestead -- Part 1

The Eastburn Homestead

There have certainly been a number of prominent families in Mill Creek Hundred over the past several hundred years, but few have had quite the reach and staying power to match the Eastburns. We've come across the Eastburns many times before in the blog, spanning several generations of the family and focusing on sites all over the hundred. However, one site that's only been mentioned in passing and never fully investigated here is the one that would have been the most dear to the family -- the original Eastburn Homestead near Pleasant Hill, south of Corner Ketch. Although the family was large and by necessity spread out, this home remained an important family base for nearly a century.

One catch, though, is that this wasn't really the "original" Eastburn home. It wasn't even their first home in Mill Creek Hundred. There were several purchases prior to the move to Pleasant Hill. When I started finding and trying make sense of the deeds, my first reaction was just to give up and go get a drink instead (although to be fair, that's my first reaction to a lot of things these days). However, after taking a bit of time to sort them all out I think I now basically understand what happened, even if some of the details still elude me. What I can tell you for sure about the family is that Quakers David Eastburn and Elizabeth Jeanes hailed from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and were married at the Gwynedd Meeting in Montgomery County in December 1801.

In December 1804, David Eastburn bought at auction two lots in Mill Creek Hundred, totaling about 150 acres. These had formerly been the lands of Thomas Springer and were located nowhere near Pleasant Hill and the area the Eastburn clan would soon make their own. This farm was at Milltown, and I believe sat on the west side of Mill Creek, encompassing what would much later become the Lindell Farm. It did not include the Reynolds-Lindell House or the mill, which were then owned by Andrew Reynolds. The tract does come west from Mill Creek and share borders with Reynolds, Rev. William McKennan, John Ball, and the heirs of Simon Paulson, and also excludes a strip for Reynolds' mill race. Beyond that I can't make much sense of the exact metes and bounds, but if anyone wants to take a crack at it I'll be happy to send you the deed.

As far as I can tell, David Eastburn and family remained on their Milltown farm for the next dozen years, until a flurry of activity in 1816, part of which I still don't quite understand. On May 17, David partnered in buying 19½ acres in Christiana Hundred from John R. Philips (whose father Robert owned Greenbank Mill and had built the Philips House and Madison Factory there). I don't know exactly where this lot was, but Philips had purchased it from the estate of Jonathan Evans (brother of inventor Oliver Evans) a few years earlier. It doesn't seem to border Red Clay Creek, but I would imagine it was somewhere close, and in the Greenbank/Faulkland area.

Eastburn's partner in the purchase introduces us to the other key player in much of this, Abel Jeanes. Jeanes was Eastburn's business partner and his brother-in-law (his wife Elizabeth's brother). And adding one more layer of complexity, Jeanes' wife was Jonathan Evans' niece (which also made her Polly Drummond's cousin, but I digress...even more). On May 31, Eastburn and Jeanes took out a mortgage on the property with Philips. The same day, Eastburn took out another mortgage with Philips for his Milltown farm.

These may have all been maneuvers specifically to set up the next transaction, which finally gets to the heart of our story. On June 3, 1816, Eastburn and Jeanes purchased a little more than 200 acres near Pleasant Hill from John Kinsey, who five years earlier had bought from Mary Black some of the extensive holdings of her late husband, Capt. James Black. The two bought the tract together, and took out a mortgage with Kinsey at the same time. Sometime over the next two years, the pair agreed to divide the tract, with each getting about half. Eastburn ended up with slightly more land than Jeanes in the December 1818 agreements, but in order to figure out why they partitioned the way they did it's helpful to take a look at a sale ad for the Black land from a few years prior.

1804 sale ad for the Black property, part of which
was purchased by Eastburn and Jeanes in 1816

The ad above, from 1804, describes the tract fairly well. The entire property was 470 acres, so Eastburn and Jeanes bought a bit under half of it, probably one of the two farms mentioned. The other likely extended to east Limestone Road, on the south side of Paper Mill Road. Jeanes' portion was slightly smaller, but he got all the "stuff" (i.e., The Eastburn-Jeanes Lime Kiln District). I believe the mentioned two-story brick house is likely the Abel Jeanes Mansion, and it sits right near the old mill (which still stands, but which Jeanes used as a warehouse).

The Eastburn area, 1849. The limestone quarries are the
smudges, the dividing lane (Eastburn/Jeanes) runs between

Even on a modern topographical map, the quarries are evident

The other important thing that fell in Jeanes' part was probably the reason the two men bought this particular property in the first place -- the lime kilns. As the ad states, the limestone quarry was already in use when Eastburn and Jeanes arrived, and a different ad does specifically state that the kilns were in operation as well. The men basically split the property into northwest (Eastburn) and southeast (Jeanes) sections. The dividing line was a newly-created lane between Upper Pike Creek Road and Polly Drummond Hill Road, seen on the 1849 map above. Importantly, and presumably not coincidentally, that division put an active quarry in each portion. They can be seen on the 1849 map (the things that look like thumbprints) and even still today on a modern topographical map.

But before we get too far into the "new" Eastburn farm, let's go back and close out the old one(s). When last we left the Eastburns' Milltown farm, David had taken out a mortgage on it, possibly to help finance the purchase of the Pleasant Hill property. Although he bought the new farm in June 1816, Eastburn did not sell his Milltown property (to John R. Philips) until January 1819. In my mind, this means one of three things -- either (1) he had it on the market and it just didn't sell for 2½ years, or (2) Eastburn leased the farm for a couple years after he moved, or (3) the family remained in Milltown for a time after the new farm was acquired. We'll return to that last possibility in the second post.

And as for the 19½ acres in Christiana Hundred that Eastburn had purchased with Abel Jeanes in 1816 (which I still can not locate), he sold his share in the lot to Jeanes in 1818. It was actually recorded the same day (December 30, 1818) as the division between the two of the Pleasant Hill tract, which again leads me to believe that somehow all of these transactions were part of one master plan. And if they were, it was a pretty good plan. David Eastburn did a fantastic job of setting up his family for success. His children and grandchildren would be among the largest landowners in the area for more than a century. His descendants are still a valuable part of the community to this day. 

Another thing about the Eastburns is that they were particularly prone to prodigious numbers of progeny. They had big families, and healthy ones. David Eastburn himself was the tenth child of eleven in his family (ten of the eleven survived to adulthood). When they moved into their new home, depending on when exactly that was, there were somewhere between nine and eleven kids already, a number that would ultimately increase to fourteen. Most surprisingly, at a time when almost half of all children born in the US would not make it to their fifth birthday, all 14 of the Eastburn children survived, although one daughter did pass at the young age of 16. I realize that people required less space then, but the house still must have been quite cozy.

It was at this point that I was originally going to give a brief rundown of all 14 Eastburns of that first generation, but "14" and "brief" just didn't end up working out, so that all got spun off into a post of its own (which will be up soon). If you don't care to meet all of the Eastburn kids individually, just know that the important point (and the point that makes the Eastburn House noteworthy) is the impact they had on the area. Most of that first generation ended up settling within a close radius of the homestead, and owning some large farms (and a few mills). Besides the Eastburn name, they would be responsible for lines of Mitchells, Buckinghams, Lloyds, Bakers, and Bells. The boys would marry into families like the Whitemans, Pennocks, Lloyds, Moores, Abbotts, Banes, and Shakespeares. If you're related to an old MCH family, there's a decent chance there's an Eastburn in your tree somewhere. In the next post we'll take a more in-depth look at the farm that most of them grew up on, tracing its history under the Eastburns and beyond.