Identify This Mystery Object

The Mystery Object

I have something I want to put out for everyone to take a look at. My hope is that maybe someone might know what the heck it is. It was found in the woods near an old farmsite (I don't want to say exactly where just yet, on the off chance it might be rare), and I have no idea what it is. It seems to be made of copper, judging by the coloration and discoloration. If I remember correctly, it's roughly about two feet long, give or take.

The catch here is that it may or may not have anything to do with the farm in which it was found. It's not very far from the barn, but it's sitting in a small creekbed. It may or may not be connected to some copper tubing that is visible nearby. The tubing comes out of the creekbank and may come from the barn as some sort of drainage system. Since the object is in this small creek, that, to me, at least raises the possibility that it could have been washed there from somewhere else, and have nothing to do with the farm. It could be an old car part for all I know.

Does anyone have any idea what this might be? Here are a couple more pictures. If you have any ideas, feel free to speak up.

The Interesting Owners of Woodside

Woodside

I know that this one, again, is technically a little outside of Mill Creek Hundred, but it's close and does have a connection. This particular topic came to my attention recently while researching the posts about Caleb Harlan and Plumgrove Farm. I had always figured that the Ferris School was built on land donated by Mr. Ferris, although until recently I had no idea who that might have been. As it turns out, though, the money to start the school came from John Ferris, but the property was purchased with that money by his cousin, Caleb Harlan.

The property that Harlan purchased, known as Woodside, of course has its own history prior to the founding of the school. I'm not interested here in going into too much detail about the very early years of the house, or details about the house itself, for that matter. If I find more about those topics, perhaps I could come back to that someday, but the focus of this post is in a slightly different direction. In particular, I want to look briefly at the last three men to own Woodside, immediately before Harlan's purchase and the founding of the school. (Unless someone owned it very briefly, I believe these are the last three owners.) While none of these men were from Mill Creek Hundred (and I think only one was technically from Christiana Hundred, where the property sits) or particularly impacted it directly, they're just interesting guys.

The Fell Historic District

Fell Historic District area, c.1860

A couple years ago (have I been doing this that long?) we took a brief look at the history of the Fell Spice Mill at Faulkland. In that post, we focused primarily on the history of the spice mill itself, and the Fell family who ran it. I mentioned, however, that there are several other aspects of the story that are worthy of their own posts. I think the most obvious are the surrounding buildings in the Faulkland area that comprise the Fell Historic District, entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. There are eight buildings in the district, erected over a period of a century and a quarter, from 1800 to 1925. Some of them are visible from Faulkland Road, and some are not. You may even have driven by them without realizing their historic nature.

We'll now take a look at these eight homes (they weren't all homes to begin with, but they are now), which I've divided into three periods -- Early, Middle, and Late (original, huh?). There's more to say about some than others, but we'll touch on them all (with pictures!!). If you want to refamiliarize yourself with the basic history of the district, I recommend going back and reading the original Spice Mill post. That will hopefully make it easier to follow along with the names being used here.

Abel Jeanes' Great Stone Barn

Aerial view of the Jeanes Barn remains

A while back, in what ended up being a series of posts (history, structures, lime kilns, Abel Jeanes), we took looks at several different aspects of the Eastburn-Jeanes Lime Kiln District. This turned out to be a fun topic to explore for a number of reasons. Among these were the facts that there is a fair amount of documentation about the area and the industry that went on there; that the families involved are pretty well documented (a process that continues today, right Donna?); and that the structures in the district are generally in a remarkable state of preservation. Except for the lime kilns themselves (which I doubt could be pressed into service now), there was only one structure mentioned that would fall into the "ruins" category -- Abel Jeanes' Great Stone Barn.

The barn was erected by Abel Jeanes in 1832 and sits sort of away from everything else, on the east side of Pike Creek. The general consensus for why Jeanes built it over there was to place it a safe distance away from any stray sparks that might escape from the lime kilns. Aside from its placement, the most outstanding feature of Jeanes' barn has always been its size. For many years after its construction, it was thought to be the largest barn in Delaware. It's not known exactly why it was built so large, but I put forth two possible explanations -- one serious and one semi-serious. My serious theory is that it was so big because of all the livestock Jeanes owned and needed to house. To do the heavy work of hauling around cartloads of lime, at the time the barn was built Jeanes owned 38 horses and 10 or 12 yoke of oxen. In this way I look at it as being as much a 19th Century parking garage as a barn. An alternate explanation is that from what we know of Abel Jeanes himself, he might have built the barn so large just because he could. He was not exactly what you'd call a shrinking violet.

Two Abandoned Bridges in the Woods

Bridge over Turkey Run

This might not be the most exciting little post, but I wanted to write it anyway. There was something I had found a little while ago and shared with someone, but I realized I never posted it for everyone to see. Now I've come across another similar situation, so I figured I'd bundle them together in one post. At issue are two small bridges -- one repurposed and one abandoned -- in the woods near ruins I've been shown recently. These bridges were never very large or heavily trafficked even when in use, and are certainly not much to look at today. What this story is, I think, more than anything, is a neat way to use a reference source I haven't touched on in a while -- the 1921 State Highway Department Bridge Survey. Well, at least I thought it was neat. Your mileage may vary.

The first bridge in question goes back to the post about the Walter Craig House, which if you'll recall is located southwest of Corner Ketch, and just north of Thompson Station Road. In the post, I mentioned that the ruins are also near an old, abandoned road, visible on the old maps, that now serves as part of one of the trails through White Clay Creek Preserve. After having walked down this old road/new trail to get to the Craig House, and before going to the ruins themselves, my guide and suburbosylvan explorer (any chance that term'll catch on?) Roger Suro showed me the bridge that carries the trail over Turkey Run. The decking and upper portion of the bridge are new, presumably put in place by the state when the trail was created. However, if you look underneath the newer footbridge's decking and railings, you'll see a much older support system.

Plumgrove Farm

In the last post, we took a fairly in-depth look at the life and works of Dr. Caleb Harlan (1814-1902), originally of Milltown. We touched on his family roots, his work as a homeopathic doctor, his poetic writings, and his instrumental role in establishing the Ferris School. To be honest, when I set out to write that post, that was pretty much all I had planned to write about. I either knew or had read little bits about all those topics, and figured that's all the post would be. However, while researching Dr. Harlan I did come across one topic that had eluded me before, and which was mentioned in the post. This in turn led to what I think was the most exciting part of the story, and one that, I believe, even ties into another one of our "ongoing investigations" here on the blog.

To be more specific, the subject in question is Harlan's 1876 agricultural treatise "Farming with Green Manures, on Plumgrove Farm". It's a highly thought-out and fairly scientifically-approached work that advises farmers on how best to use the idea of green manures on their fields. This process involves strategically planting cover crops in certain fields, then plowing this vegetation into the soil in order to replenish nutrients. The concept was not new in the 1870's (heck, it's really just a better version of the centuries old idea of crop rotation), but Harlan approached it in a very scientific way, always looking for better methods to use. The ideas he espoused in his book were not just theoretical -- they were based on years of actual experimentation.

Caleb Harlan -- Physician, Poet, Agronomist

Dr. Caleb Harlan

For any given area, you'll always be able to find a few people who stand out from the rest. Not necessarily for their talent or success (although those may come with it), but just because they seem to think a bit differently from those around them, or do things that others don't. One such person in Mill Creek Hundred a century and a half ago was Caleb Harlan. He was born to a family of farmers and millers, but ended up using his intellect more than his frail body for both his profession and his passion. He had the mind of a poet and a radical thinker, but always remained focused on improving the well-being of his fellow man, both physically and economically. His name is almost forgotten today, but there was a time when I'm sure almost everyone in the area knew Dr. Harlan.

Caleb Harlan was born on October 13, 1814 to John and Elizabeth (Quinby) Harlan, at their home in Milltown. John Harlan (1773-1851) was a Quaker miller who, along with brothers Caleb, Jr. and Joshua, owned and operated a mill along Mill Creek at the intersection of Limestone Road and Milltown Road. The "new" mill erected by the Harlan brothers in 1815, converted in the 20th Century to a residence, still stands today. No other homes from this era remain (the brick house next to the mill was built by a later owner in 1860's), but it's very possible that the Harlan house(s) stood on the east side of the old course of Limestone Road. This would place them right in the current path of Limestone Road, as changed in 1964.

More About the McDaniel-Peach House

McDaniel-Peach House, 1910's

A while back I did a couple of posts about a pair of related houses -- the John McDaniel House and the McDaniel-Peach House. I had a few scraps of information about the John McDaniel House, but for the older McDaniel-Peach House I was left with little more than an old story and a heap of educated guesses. Recently (OK, my version of "recently" is "within the past few months"), however, I've been fortunate enough to have been contacted by several people with family connections to the McDaniel-Peach House. And while we still don't have all the answers, they were able to fill in a few blanks along the way. In the process -- in regard to the original post -- I managed to confirm one thing I wrote and refute another. And while we're here, we'll take a quick look at the industry that flourished for a time on the property.

First, to quickly get everyone up to speed and recap the original post, the McDaniel-Peach House is located just north of Paper Mill Road, about half way between North Star Road and Limestone Road in the development of Chestnut Valley. I had speculated that it was built sometime before 1777 by James McDaniel, who may have been a descendant of Bryan McDonald, an early MCH settler in the area near Brandywine Springs. The 1777 date sprung from a story related by Francis Cooch in the 1930's, and later compiled in the book Little Known History of Newark, Delaware and Its Environs. (I'm happy to say I found the original version of  Cooch's article, printed October 16, 1932.) I believe that a few of the items graciously forwarded to me to share can shed some light on the construction of this home overlooking the Pike Creek Valley.