The Fascinating (and Confusing) Lobb Family -- Part II

Locations of past and current (as of 1881) Lobb properties

In the last post, we took a deep and confusing look at the Lobb family, who from 1847 until 1882 lived along Barley Mill Road amid land now owned by the Mt. Cuba Center. There were a number of obstacles to understanding the family from the census records, mostly due to uncertainties over the identity of various people's parents. Our starting point was the 1850 Census, compiled only three years after Mary and George W. Lobb purchased their home, and helpfully enough the first census to list every person individually by name. Unfortunately the 1850 Census did not list each person's relationship to the head-of-household (which would have been really helpful), as that did not begin until 1880.

The first mystery we face for the family in the 1850 Census is the relationship between Mary and George, with whom she bought the house and three acre lot. He's definitely not her husband, as you might first assume. He was born in 1828, about thirty years after Mary, and a few years later married the former Hannah Hoopes. In the 1860 Census, George, Hannah, and their children are listed as a separate household in the same house as Mary and the others. George's occupation is shown as butcher, which would make sense for a man with a small (three acre) farm. In 1870 he's listed completely separate from Mary's household, and shown as owning $15,000 in real estate. Although that's quite a large amount, he's nowhere to be found on the 1868 map. Judging from the names near him, he seems to have been somewhere on Lancaster Pike near Wooddale. I've also not found any record of George's buying any other properties in Delaware. I cannot explain his 1870 listing.

What I can explain is where he and his family went next. Sometime before 1880, George bought a farm in Pennsbury Township, Chester County -- just west of Chadds Ford. Although I don't have access to Pennsylvania land records, the map seen below, from 1883, shows George Lobb's farm just above the center. For reference, The Gables at Chadds Ford restaurant is now located in that small, triangular intersection directly south. There is still a house on Lobb's property which is dated to c.1740, meaning it was likely his home. The bigger question for us, though, is who was George W. Lobb?

The Fascinating (and Confusing) Lobb Family -- Part I

Often when I think about local history, I come back to that line that I was always told as a kid if I asked about what "used to be here" -- It was all just farmland. And by raw acreage, that's not completely inaccurate. Most of New Castle County was, in fact, farms. But that statement overlooks two important facts. One, there were other things beside farms, like mills, churches, taverns, and all sorts of artisans. Secondly, those farms were occupied by real families. Families who lived lives just as complex and interwoven as we do now. Their stories are filled with joys, tragedies, struggles, and complications that rival (if not exceed) anything we experience today. 

The problem for us now is that most of those stories are lost to time. We can catch glimpses of them through historical records, but sometimes the whole story is frustratingly out of reach for us. When doing genealogical research, it's important to keep in mind that on the one hand, there may be mysteries that'll never be solved. But on the other hand, if you keep digging, you just might find other amazing surprises you never knew were there. The story of the Lobb family of Red Clay Valley certainly as plenty of all of these phenomena.

My initial point of entry into the Lobbs' story is the household of Mary Lobb, residing on a three acre lot on the northeast side of Barley Mill Road, now nestled amidst land owned by the neighboring Mt. Cuba Center. Although the county lists the erection date of the house as 1735, the Lobbs had only owned it for three years at the time of the 1850 Census (which we'll return to shortly). In 1847, Mary Lobb and George Lobb purchased the lot from Jesse and Rachel Bishop. Rachel might well have been Mary's sister (although like most things here, there's no consensus), and George we'll address more in the next post. The Lobb and Bishop families were obviously close, and had ties that went back at least a generation or two.

The Alrich-Wooleyhan farm

The Wooleyhans' West Wind farm

For this story, we're again going to travel outside the confines of Mill Creek Hundred, this time southward into White Clay Creek Hundred. But New Castle County being what it is, by the time we get near the end we will have a direct link to one of the oldest families in Mill Creek Hundred. Like several of our recent outings, this too was initiated by a simple question from a reader about a property that had been in her family. There was some brief confusion at first, but I quickly came to understand that the farm in question had been located on Old Baltimore Pike, southwest of the historic Village of Christiana. The farm is gone now, replaced by the development of Norwegian Woods (isn't it good?).

The property was owned by her family in the mid-20th Century, but she was interested to find out about the earlier owners. This ended up being one of those situations that got more confusing the deeper I dove, until it suddenly all became clear. One thing that made this a little easier was that we don't have to delve back into the deep depths of history here. The 133 acre property that would become the farm was not a separate tract until 1860. Before that, it was part of a much larger tract, which most recently had been purchased by Henry L. Smalley in 1848. Smalley died just a few years later, and after a couple intermediate transactions, his widow Tabitha sold 133 acres to William E. Heisler. This is the part that confused me at first, and which serves as a good example of why it's sometimes good to keep digging, even if on the surface it seems pointless.

There originally had been some confusion with what is known as the Heisler Tenancy Site, which was an African-American-occupied, 19th Century farmstead. This site, however was located on the north side of Christiana. It was owned for a time by William Heisler, but when I first researched him, all I could find was that he owned what's now known as Blue Hen Farm, north of Newark. I figured he was a wealthy Newark-area farmer who just happened to buy and sell a few properties in the Christiana area. I was about to move on from him, but decided to dig a bit more.