Ashland Mill -- Part 1

Ashland Mill, 1895

As we've seen many times on this blog, Mill Creek Hundred may be the most aptly named of all the hundreds in Delaware (although to be fair, I don't know how many ducks there are in Duck Creek Hundred, and I don't even want to deal with either of the Murderkills). And even though we've covered many of the mills in the area already, there are still some we've yet to hit upon. One point that has come up several times is the fact that the majority of the mills along Red Clay Creek are situated on the west (MCH) side of the waterway. There are a few, however, on the Christiana Hundred side, including one of the earliest, which has direct connections to "our side" of the creek. This one was even mentioned previously in an "On the Road" post.

The Gregg family originally settled in eastern Christiana Hundred in the 1680's, near what would later become Montchanin. William Gregg, the patriarch of the family, had four children, but the one we're concerned with now was his son John. John Gregg (1668-1738) was a prodigious purchaser of property, ending up with holdings in the thousands of acres. One of his purchases was a 200 acre tract straddling Red Clay Creek, which he bought from Letitia Penn's agent in 1702.

The Aaron F. Klair Bible

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about Aaron F. Klair and his family, spurred by an earlier post about the anti-liquor Klair Law. Then, not long ago, I got one of those wonderful, completely out of the blue emails I receive once in a while. It was from a woman named Marion who had purchased an old Bible off of Ebay a while back. What she enjoys doing is buying old books, diaries, Bibles, and so forth, and researching the people who owned them. In this case she ended up on the blog here because this particular Bible had once belonged to Aaron F. Klair.
 
As a quick refresher, Aaron Francis Klair was born in 1863 to Egbert and Elizabeth (Cranston) Klair, who at the time resided in the stone house now on the grounds of the former Three Little Bakers golf course. Aaron F.'s grandfather was also named Aaron, and his father was Frederick Klair. It was Frederick who, in 1810, moved his family from Pennsylvania into house on Limestone Road formerly owned by Rev. William McKennan.

Catching Up and Some Odds and Ends

Old Capitol Trail and Newport Gap Pike, 1965

As you may have noticed, the blogging here has been a bit light the past month. Ok, more than light. Non-existent. I apologize for the hiatus to anyone who looks forward to these posts, but my real life has been busy and hectic the past few weeks. Things are finally starting to calm down a bit now, and beginning to get back to whatever passes for normal these days. For whatever it's worth to whoever might care, I'm hoping to get back to a more regular posting schedule this week.

Now that that's out of the way, I have a few little things that, for lack of a better idea, I'm just going to throw all together in one post here: