Mary Jane Chambers and her sons (L-R):
Samuel Kemble, George R., Richard
McCausland, Charles, John Jay

I am proud and honored to present another Guest Post to the blog, this one written by someone who not only has done a great deal of research on the subject, but who also has a unique insight into it. John Whiteclay Chambers II is a retired professor and former chair of the History Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He also, as his name would suggest, is a member of the Chambers family that has had a presence in northwestern MCH and northern White Clay Creek Hundred for over 300 years. Much of their former land is now part of White Clay Creek State Park (DE) and White Clay Creek Preserve (PA), and if you've ever driven along Chambers Rock Road you've gone right through the middle of Chambers land. My great thanks goes out to John for sharing this with us, and for allowing me to share it. (The words are his, only the photo captions are mine.) I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Restoring the Chambers Family Farm in the 20th Century

By John Whiteclay Chambers II

Copyright © John Whiteclay Chambers II, 2021; excerpt from the author’s manuscript, The History of the Chambers Family of Hilltop.

Do not reprint without permission of the author.

EDITORIAL NOTE: The author, a member of the Chambers family, who retired from the History

Faculty at Rutgers University in 2017, welcomes corrections and additional relevant material on the subjects covered. john.chambers@rutgers.edu.

After nearly two hundred years of farming the rich land along White Clay Creek near the Delaware-Pennsylvania boundary, the Chambers family faced a crisis when the matriarch died at age 89 in 1906. For the past forty years, after the death of her husband, strong-willed and able Mary Jane Kemble Chambers had managed the Chambers farm.¹ Now with her demise, would the farmstead continue? It had begun in 1715, when English Quakers John and Deborah Chambers and their four children started farming there. Five years later, they officially bought 664 acres from William Penn’s family in 1720.²

The death of the matriarch threatened an end to the Chambers family farm. The property was down to 168 acres with the manor house “Hilltop.” None of the five surviving children of Mary Jane and John W. Chambers wanted to be farmers. Still she left the farm to them.³ After helping to work the farm summers between school, each of these five young men had left for the booming towns and cities of industrializing, late nineteenth century Pennsylvania. They had done well. Despite the sons’ aversion to farm work, three of them, Samuel, John J., and Charles, decided, after their mother’s death, to reacquire the land that had been sold over the previous two centuries: The Thompson and Evans farms on Chambers Rock Road and the Pyle farm on Creek Road. Within a decade, together their late mother’s 168 acres at Hilltop, they had reassembled 508 acres of Chambers farms, and hired tenants to work them.

Locations of the once and future Chambers farms, 1881. Note that the state line now
runs just east of Hillside and Pennview. Only Hillside and Hillvale are no longer standing

By the time the last of these three brothers died in 1928, those farms, through inheritance or purchase, were acquired by yet another strong-willed and able woman in the family. Mary Chambers Folwell was the matriarch’s granddaughter, the daughter of Samuel K. Chambers, West Grove merchant and banker, and Rebecca Ballard Chambers, president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.⁴ Mary Chambers Folwell, who insisted on being called by her full name, and used the initials, “M.C.F.,” was proud of her Chambers heritage. A little dynamo—only about five feet tall and weighing less than one hundred pounds—she was determined and able, and she committed herself to reassembling the original Chambers farm and having it make a profit.⁵ Between the 1920s and 1950s, Mary Chambers Folwell expanded her holdings to 515 of the 664 acres that John and Deborah Chambers had purchased from William Penn’s family in 1720, and, with her wealthy husband, made Chambers farm quite profitable.⁶

In the 1950s, a rumor was circulating through the area that the original Chambers property from the Penn family had been 1,000 acres.⁷ The Recorder of Deeds summary of the 1720 deed did include the words “the Hop Yard,” but the practice of using marked oak trees or rocks sometimes to designate boundaries has lost its usefulness over the centuries. In any event, Hopyard, whose 1843 manor house is still today on Hopkins Bridge Road, on the eastern side of White Clay Creek was only farmed by the Chambers family from 1715 until it was sold in 1738.⁸ For two centuries, most of the Chambers farmland was on the west side of White Clay Creek. 

Having spent many happy summer days as a young girl at her grandmother’s “Hilltop” farm in the 1890s, Mary Chambers Folwell had wonderful memories of the property.⁹ In 1904, after graduating from Smith College, she had married a wealthy Philadelphia woolen textile manufacturer, P. [Philip] Donald Folwell, who had been a classmate at Quaker high school. His capital and her inheritance gave her the financial resources to do what she wanted. While Donald’s hobby was collecting antique automobiles,¹⁰ Mary’s became rebuilding the original Chambers farm and ensuring it made a profit. 

Mary Chambers Folwell, ready for a drive in a 1906 Model 24
 Packard open roadster, in front of her home in Merion

From the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, Mary Chambers Folwell was able to expand the restoration of what she titled Chambers Rocks Farm, and she was also able to have it make a profit.¹¹ Presumably, the name she gave the farm was from “Chambers Rocks Quarry,” a stone mining operation on the creek on the family’s property sometime in the nineteenth century, but which was long forgotten.¹² Although she named it Chambers Rocks (plural) Farm and had the two-lane country road through it named Chambers Rocks (also plural) Road, both the locals and intermittently even the local newspaper, referred to it as Chambers Rock (singular) Farm and Road. After she sold out in the 1950s, the road was officially renamed Chambers Rock (singular) Road, which it remains today.¹³

See? It really was Chambers' Rocks Farms

At its peak, in 1955, Chambers Rocks Farm reached 515 of the original estimated 664 acres and stretched again across both sides of the Delaware-Pennsylvania line.¹⁴ It was an enormous holding for an individual’s farm in the area. Young Jack Murray, whose parents bought “Pennview” and its ten-acre farm on Chambers Rock Road from Mary Chambers Folwell in 1957, was not alone in being in awe by it. “I remember…my Dad pointing all around, saying Mrs. Folwell owned it all,” Murray recalled. “I thought she must have been the richest person in the world!”¹⁵

The caption says it all

With her determination and her husband’s ample resources, Chambers Rock Farm also became a model operating farmstead under the ownership of “Mrs. Mary Chambers Folwell of Newark,” as she was reverently referred to in the newspapers of Newark and Wilmington, Delaware. She and her husband decided that the farm, with its broad sweep of pasture along White Clay Creek, was best used for a dairy herd, which they began with twenty pure-bred, registered Jersey cattle. To build and manage the dairy farm, Mary Chambers Folwell hired an experienced local dairyman, Gates C. Gilmore. For the manager’s quarters, she renovated “Pennview,” the 1851 manor house, at what is today 762 Chambers Rock Road. A stone house just west of it housed the farm’s laborers. After Gates Gilmore was hired away by Westtown Boarding School, he was succeeded as manager of the dairy farm by his brother Leon C. Gilmore. With Mrs. Folwell’s support, the new manager increased the size of the herd to some 120 cows. The farm’s prestige continued to soar, as its full-blooded Jerseys won prizes at local fairs in Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland. On its May 1928 cover, The Jersey Bulletin and Dairy World, a national trade magazine, heralded the farm’s accomplishments, declaring, “Chambers Rocks Farm is one of the great Jersey establishments of the eastern seaboard.”¹⁶

Fawn colored Jerseys and Guernseys produce milk with a higher percentage of fat and protein than the black and white Holsteins, and their rich milk is highly valued, for butter and ice cream.¹⁷ One of Mary Chambers Folwell’s prize-winning Jerseys, named “Prosperity’s Golden Dora,” yielded 11,441 pounds of milk and 631 pounds of butterfat in 1928. The seven-year-old’s milk averaged 5.51 per cent butterfat. One of the herd’s younger, four-year-old Jerseys won a prize for milk averaging 6.13 percent butter fat.¹⁸ These and other purebred cattle from the farm pastured in the rich soil and grass of the flood plains along White Clay Creek and on the steep hillside leading to the barn. “We loved those Jersey cows,” recalled David Gray, who grew up nearby, “because we were enamored of butter fat, and churning and butter and ice cream…I remember those cows so well. They had cow bells on them too…all orange cows, no black and white cows.”¹⁹

Modern aerial view of Hilltop

The large increase in the size of the herd, led Mary Chambers Folwell to increase the farm’s own feed supply. A winter’s worth would be stored in siloes for the herd, and the excess would be an additional source of revenue. But dairy farming was one thing, and growing crops was another, especially on the high hillsides of the family’s holdings. “We always felt so sorry for the Chambers,” David Gray added. “Those are steep roads and hills, and it is difficult to farm on a hill…everything has to be reinforced and banked up, and travel is difficult. So I don’t know how the Chambers ever made any money on those poor farms.”²⁰ 

Steep hills were notorious among farmers in the area. The locals did indeed sympathize with the Chambers for working such difficult ground. “The Chambers boys must have one leg shorter than the other from plowing around their hills,” neighbors quipped, according to Chambers family lore.²¹ From the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, despite the difficulties, the hard-working Quaker family had persevered. They had worked hard and made enough to feed their families, buy more land, build study barns and stately manor houses, and send their children to Westtown Friend’s boarding school. In the twentieth century, Mary Chambers Folwell, through her prize-winning cattle and agricultural commodities was able to make Chambers Rock Farm not only self-sustaining but once again profitable.

Under German-born Otto Drobeck, who became supervisor of crop yield in 1933, the farm also became a tri-state leader in soil conservation and crop production. A former German soldier and sheep herder, Drobeck came to Chambers Rock Farm with his family from Munich in 1926. He started as a laborer. After proving so hardworking, efficient and innovative, he was, after seven years, promoted to be the crop manager.²² In order to increase the yield grain needed for the increasing size of the herd, he introduced a number of innovations from the New Deal’s Department of Agriculture (USDA). To deal with some particularly steep hills, where rain run off washed away fertilizer and soil, Drobeck began planting rows of trees along the most eroded gullied hillsides and creating some terracing to reduce runoff. In 1937, Chambers Rocks Farm became one of the first to join the new federal Soil Conservation Service’s demonstration district in the Christiana Creek Watershed, which included White Clay Creek.

Pennview today

Drobeck eagerly adopted the recommendations of the government’s experts. He increased the terracing of sloping fields and built a number of diversion ditches. He also engaged in strip farming and contour plowing to conserve rainwater and channel the excess to the tributary streams that flow down into the creek. Previously unused spaces were cleaned up and planted. Any marginal land that remained was reforested with white pine, which became a good cash crop itself. As the USDA recommended, Wildlife was surveyed. New fertilizers and pesticides, approved by the USDA, were put to use. The latter included a newly developed insecticide, D.D.T., which was then heralded as effective and began to be widely used. (It was not banned as hazardous to wildlife and the environment until 1972, a decade after Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring persuaded the public of its dangers.) In 1941, Drobeck claimed that, while cutting the acreage used in production in half, he was still able to maintain both the amount and the quality of the previous crop yield.²³

“During a period of drought and many crop failures,” Mary Chambers Folwell remembered, “our grain proved better than ever before.”²⁴ In August 1938, the USDA held a “field show,” showing off Chambers Rock Farm as a model for its new soil conservation and increased crop yield techniques. It was at Pennview, on Chambers Rock Road, the 10-acre farm where Drobeck, as crop manager, lived. Growers from throughout the tri-state region were particularly impressed by Chambers Rock Farm’s high crop yields per acre—including 18 feet corn, 7 feet barley, plus soy beans, alfalfa and buckwheat—in addition the farm’s profitable milk production and breeding of Jersey cattle.²⁵

The masonry silos of Hillside Farm

With the labor shortage in World War II, the size of the workforce at the farm plunged from 10 to 4, which was the maximum number allowed by government restrictions. But the smaller crew maintained pre-war levels of crop and milk production because Mary Chambers Folwell further modernized the barns. Beginning in the early 1930s, Otto Drobeck had put electricity into some of the houses, and possibly also the barn.²⁶ During the war, Mary Chambers Folwell purchased the latest new types of electric milking machines and coolers. Also helping to maintain production were the local boys who helped with planting and harvesting, especially in the summer months. The farm continued generating profits during and after the war.²⁷

Many of Donald and Mary Chambers Folwell’s six children and numerous grandchildren spent much of their summers on the farm.²⁸ As president and coowner of his family’s woolen clothing mill, Folwell & Bro., P. Donald Folwell usually remained weekdays in Philadelphia. Afterwards, during summer weekends or vacations, he would join Mary and their family at the farm or at their beach house at Avalon on the New Jersey shore.²⁹ The family’s primary residence was an estate in Merion, a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. Mary Chambers Folwell and their younger children, at least until they grew up, returned there in time for school. 

In 1950, the Folwells’ youngest son, 26-year-old William H. (“Bill”) Folwell, and his wife, Anne, returned to Chambers Rocks Farm from Indiana, Pennsylvania, where he had been working as an Assistant Agricultural Extension Agent. The family had sent him to Penn State University and he had previously graduated with a degree in Agronomy. ³⁰ Mary Chambers Folwell wanted him to take over managing the 515-acre Chambers Rocks Farm. Young Bill Folwell replaced Otto Drobeck, who was let go after twenty-six years at the farm. 

But all Mary Chambers Folwell’s hopes for the continuation of Chambers Rocks Farm came to an end five years later, when her husband died in 1955, at age 74.³¹ Although young Bill Folwell had been educated to manage the large farm, Mary Chambers Folwell, always a realist, decided in 1955, to sell most of the Chambers properties. There were various reasons for her decision, including the current state of the farm, her husband’s death, and the Du Pont Company’s continuing plan build a dam and reservoir, inundating the White Clay Creek Valley, in order to increase Newark’s water supply. She knew that her decision to sell meant the end of a dream of reconstructing the original farm and Chambers’ property to the 664 acres that John and Deborah Chambers had purchased from the Penn family in 1720. 

Quickly, Mary Chambers Folwell began liquidating most of Chambers Rocks Farm.³² The stone “Chambers House” on Creek Road went to Eugene and Adeline Robinson in 1955. As for the properties on Chambers Rock Road, in 1956, she sold “Hilltop,” the 1851 manor house perched on eight acres, to a Du Pont executive, Wilbur (“Bill”) Johnson, and his wife, Ruth. In 1957,“Pennview,” another 1851 manor house, which Mary Chambers Folwell had used as the farm manager’s residence, was sold. The buyer was John A. Murray, an administrator at the University of Delaware, and his wife, Anne.³³ In 1959, convinced that the Du Pont company would build its dam and reservoir to bolster Newark’s water supply, Mary Chambers Folwell, accepted the Du Pont offer that she had rejected ten years earlier and sold the 207 low-lying acres to the company. On the low ground at the bottom of Chambers Rock Road, the Du Pont Company soon demolished the vacant 1816 stone manor house, “Hillvale,” but left its wooden barn to deteriorate. 

Hillside Farm House, c. 1925

Up the hill, on the north side of Chambers Rock Road, the two-story, farmhouse at “Hillside” remained abandoned. The dairy barn there had burned down in the late 1940s. Only its stone and concrete foundation remained, along with its ceramic brown silos. On the night of July 12, 1960, a fire destroyed the vacant wood frame house.³⁴ A few weeks later, Mary Chambers Folwell sold “Hillside” and most of its 3.8 acres to a cousin, Rhoda Chambers Ware. In 1966, Rhoda Chambers Ware, in turn, deeded it to her nephew, John Whiteclay Chambers II, who is the last Chambers to own part of the farm that had been in the Chambers family for 250 years. ³⁵ 

Mary Chambers Folwell died in 1966 at age 84. The remaining land near Hilltop was bequeathed to some of her children. Bill Folwell had become a tenured associate professor of U.S. Cooperative Extension Service Information, locally connected to Penn State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences. He inherited much of the land at the top of the hill, but not the already sold Hilltop manor house. He managed what was left of Chambers Rocks Farm. Before his death in 1997, he sold his land to developers. In the 1980s and 1990s the wooded acreage, on the southwest side of Hilltop, became scattered with suburban housing that the developers advertised as “Chambers Rock Farm.”³⁶ 

The dam and reservoir planned by the Du Pont company were never built, the valley never inundated. Strong opposition emerged between the 1960s and 1980s, led by women from the White Clay Creek area in Delaware and Pennsylvania, and some male members of the United Auto Workers from the two big auto plants in Newark. Together with the Sierra Club, Audubon Society, fly fishermen’s association, trail clubs and others, environmentalists worked relentlessly to save the White Clay Creek Valley, and they eventually won major political support. As a result, Du Pont abandoned its plan to dam the creek and flood the valley. Instead, it found alternative ways to provide the needed water supply—and other uses for the properties it had acquired.³⁷

In 1984, the Du Pont Company transferred ownership of the 1,700 acres, which it had acquired for a dam and reservoir, to the states of Delaware and Pennsylvania. The objective, on the recommendation of the National Park Service, was to protect the diverse and unique plant and animal species, and the cultural heritage of the area. Some 1,200 acres were donated to Pennsylvania and 500 acres to Delaware, for the creation of a bi-state “low impact recreational preserve.” The result was the White Clay Creek State Preserve in Pennsylvania and the White Clay Creek State Park in Delaware.³⁸ Most of the 207 acres of low-lying land along the west side of the creek that Mary Chambers Folwell sold to the Du Pont Company in 1959, are in Delaware’s state park. The rest are in Pennsylvania’s state preserve.

The Chambers House, aka Stairways. Now the
 White Clay Creek State Park Nature Center

What remains of Chambers farm’s 505 acres that Mary Chambers Folwell had restored to the family in the twentieth century? Nearly half is preserved in the two state parks. Of that part, “Hillvale” on Chambers Rock Road by the creek was demolished, so the only the 1820 stone farmhouse on Creek Road still exists. Today it is the Nature Center in Delaware’s White Clark Creek State Park, and is called “Chambers House.”³⁹ That “Chambers House,” together with the Chambers’ 1851 stone manor houses, “Pennview” and “Hilltop, the siloes at “Hillside,” the suburban development called “Chambers Rock Farm,” all on or near Chambers Rock Road—plus, of course, the giant creek boulder, “Chambers Rock” itself,—are all that remain to mark the legacy of the Chambers family that farmed the land for two and a half centuries.

Footnotes:

¹Mary Jane Kemble Chambers (1818-1906) was from nearby Kemblesvlle; a photocopy of her death certificate from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Dec. 10, 1906, File No. 119317, is in the possession of John Whiteclay Chambers II. Her late husband was John W. Chambers (1816-1869).

² John Chambers (1662-1730) , 51, and Deborah Dobson (1666/68?-1731) and John’s five children: John, 23, and William, 32, from with his deceased first wife, Elizabeth Austwicke (c. 1658-1697), and Richard, 13, Joseph, 9 or 10, and Mary 5 or 6, from with Deborah Dobson, his second wife immigrated from Yorkshire to Pennsylvania in 1713. In 1720, John Chambers purchased 664 acres, on the north side of the White Clay Creek, from David Lloyd, agent for the Penn Family. The original 1720 deed, with its Great Seal, was held, as late as the 1950s, by Robert and Jane Hopkins, owners of Hopyard, Hopkins Bridge Road, Newark, Delaware. This deed was entered in the Docket of the Court of Common Pleas, New Castle, 1720, p. 172. See Mary Chambers Folwell, typed notes for her unfinished History of the Chambers family, February 1959, Ch. 3, p. 9, in the Chambers Family Papers (Collection 1939), Series 1, Box 2, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.

³ Mary Jane Chambers, Last Will and Testament, White Clay Hundred, New Castle County, Delaware, May 5, 1888, copy in possession of John Whiteclay Chambers II. See also the “Registrar’s Order,” Wilmington Morning News, Dec. 18, 1906, 2.

⁴ Mary Chambers Folwell (1881-1966); Chambers Family Papers (Collection 1939) Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pa. 

⁵ Eugene “Dick” Robinson, Interviews July 2005 through March 2006, by Andrea Cassel, et al., typed 12 page summary for Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, page 2. I am grateful to Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist at the Park for providing me with this entire document, January 28 2021. Robinson, whom Mary Chambers Folwell called “Dickie,” knew her well in the 1950s, having rented and then purchased one of her houses, “Stairways,” later “Chambers House,” from her during that decade. 

⁶ Mary Ballard Chambers Folwell (1881-1966), acreage figures from her, farm settlement and memoranda Book, 1959-1965, data included in Mary Chambers Folwell, “Forward,” n.p., typed notes for her unfinished history of the Chambers family, Marion, Pa., February 1959, in the Chambers Family Papers (Collection 1939), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. 

⁷ On the rumor of 1,000 acres, Eugene “Dick” Robinson Interviews, July 2005 through March 2006, by Andrea Cassel et al., for Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, page 1, and Anne Murray April 5, 2020, interview with the present author, transcript page 8. Anne Murray, lived at Pennview farm, at 760-762 Chambers Rock Road from 1956 to 2000.

⁸ Although the summary of the coverage of the 1720 deed may not be clear, the key part of the 1738 deed is clear: Joseph Chambers sold to Henry Geddes, Hopyard and 221 acres, being part of the Joseph’s original 430 acres east of White Clay Creek, Deed, Nov. 8 and 9, 1738, Liber M, pages 82-87, New Castle County Recorder of Deeds. If the 430 is added to the 664 acres obtained from the Penns, it would be more than a thousand acres (1,094), but the derivation is not clear. The most detailed account of the history of Hopyard is by Scott Palmer, “The Samuel Tyson House, aka The Hopyard Farm,” in Palmer’s The Mill Creek Hundred History Blog, May 14, 2020.

⁹ Excerpts from the Diary of Mary B. Chambers (soon Mrs. P. Donald Folwell), transcribed fifty years later by the older Mary Chambers Folwell, excerpts transcribed in a letter to a cousin, Richard McCausland Chambers, Oct. 31, 1956, in possession of the John Whiteclay Chambers II. Evidence of her family pride is in her “History of the Chambers Family,” 1660 to 1959, Marion, Pa., February 1959, Chambers Family Papers (Collection 1939), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa 

¹⁰ Philip Donald Folwell (1881-1955). son of Nathan T. Folwell (1847-1930) and Sarah (Harned) Folwell, was heir, co-owner and president of Folwell, Bro. & Co., Inc., a woolen and worsted cloth factory, Collingwood Mills, occupying an entire block at 2835 North Third Street, in Philadelphia. Donald was an antique car enthusiast and major figure in the Antique Auto Club of America, see The Old Motor, a vintage automobile internet magazine, March 10, 2011, issue, 591. A photo of Mary Chambers Folwell in a 1906 Model 24 Packard open roadster in front of their Merion house was generously sent to me by Kathleen N. Sullivan, Naturalist at Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park. She found it on a Facebook page, which cited only www.theoldmotor.com.

¹¹ Mary Chambers Folwell, “History of the Chambers Family,” 7, and research by the present author.

¹² Francis (“Frank”) Cornell interviews Sept. 22 and 24, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II. I am indebted to Aileen Parrish, a current, longtime supervisor of London Britain Township, for introducing me to him. Frank Cornell learned about the quarry on the Chambers property from Elwood S. Wilkins, Jr. (1905-2002), prominent local historian, who authored several publications of the Archaeological Society of Delaware. Wilkins’ son, Jim Hill, 66, said he had heard about Chambers Rocks Quarry from his father, but more on the still obvious remains of the nearby Sharpless limestone quarry. Harold James Hill, interview January 26, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II.

¹³ Her stationery, clearly shows Rocks (plural). Here is the wording of the letterhead: “Chambers Rocks Farm, Breeders of Jersey Cattle, Newark, Delaware, R.F.D. #2,” copy in possession of John Whiteclay Chambers II; other copies in Mary Chambers Folwell, “History of the Chambers Family,” typescript 1959, Chambers Family Papers (Collection 1939), Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia, Pa.; and Barbe Ballard Breylinger, her granddaughter, “History of the Chambers Family of Delaware” typescript, 2008, Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, Delaware. I am grateful to DHS curator Edward Richi for providing me with a photocopy during the corona virus pandemic 2020-2021. But local residents from the 1950s recall it as Chambers Rock Farm and Road, interviews by the present author, with Anne Murray, April 15, 2020, Joseph (“Joe”) Allmond, April 22, 2020, David Gray, August 6, 2020. It was intermittently singular and plural in Newark Post articles, April 30, 1924, p.3; Mary 23, 1929, p. 1, Feb 30, 1941, p. 1, April 3, 1941, p. 2, and June 7, 1951; but consistently singular in the Wilmington News Journal in the 1950s. For fuller explanation and citations, see John Whiteclay Chambers II, “Behemoth in White Clay Creek: Chambers Rock and its Complex Legacy,” a chapter in the same author’s, “The Chambers Family of Hilltop.” 

¹⁴ Acreage figures from Mary Chambers Folwell, “Chambers Family History,” Forward,” and p. 40-41, and from her farm settlement and memoranda book, 1959-1965, in ibid., Box 8.

¹⁵ John D. (“Jack”) Murray, who was eight years old when the family moved into 962 Chambers Rock Road in 1957.email to John Whiteclay Chambers II, May 2, 2020.

¹⁶ “The Cover Cut This Week,” The Jersey Bulletin and Dairy World, May 9, 1928, cover story; the Gilmore brothers in Mary Chambers Folwell, “History of the Chambers Family, “ Ch. 3, pages 40-42,” HPS.

¹⁷ Sara Welch, “How to Identify Common Breeds of Dairy Cattle,” Farm and Dairy, June 6, 2017, www.farmanddairy.com; also articles on “Cattle,” “Jersey,” “Guernsey,” and “Holstein,” in Mason’s World Encyclopedia of Animal Breeds and Breeding, eds. Valerie Potter, et al., 2 vols. (Wallingford, U.K.: CABI, 2016), 6th edition.

¹⁸ “Newark Cow Sets New State Record,” Newark Post, Oct. 5, 1927, 1; “Newark Cow Completed Highest State Record,” ibid., Jan. 11, 1928,1 ; “Local Cows Set State Records,” ibid., July 12, 1929; I am indebted to Joseph Allmond for reference to these articles.

¹⁹ David Gray, interview with John W. Chambers II, April 24, 2020. Holsteins, black and white, produce more milk than the brown and white Jersey, but of lesser richness.

²⁰ David Gray, interview with John W. Chambers II, April 24, 2020.

²¹ Chambers family lore according to John Whiteclay Chambers II, and Thompson, What Love Can Do.

²² “Drobeck Overcomes Erosions at Rock Farm: Chambers Farm Furnishes Good Example of Soil Conservation,” Newark Post, April 3, 1941, 2, which indicates that he arrived from Germany in 1926 and became manager in 1933. After an alleged feud with a prominent Nazi in Munich, Robinson brought his wife and two sons to the United States through a Quaker group, and Mary Chambers Folwell gave him a job starting as a laborer. Information on Drobeck from the Newark Post articles above; Robinson, interviews July 2005 through March 2006, by Andrea Cassel, et al., summary page 2; and Eugene C. (“Dick”) Robinson’s interview with Jan Owens, and her memories of those interviews, all of which she kindly shared with the present author on February 18, April 21, and May 4, 2020, plus the relevant portions of the Zoom presentations that she gave, and I attended, on May 25 and June 1, 2020. Jan Owens is writing a book on the history of White Clay Creek and the citizens’ movement that preserved it. I deeply appreciate Jan Owen’s gracious generosity in providing information that she had obtained over the years, not only about Drobeck but also about the White Clay Creek Valley and its preservation.

²³ Drobeck Overcomes Erosions at Rock Farm: Chambers Farm Furnishes Good Example of Conservation,” Newark Post, April 3 1941, 2. The use of D.D.T. on the farm is from Eugene C. (“Dick”) Robinson’s interview with Jan Owens, excerpts of which she shared with the present author. See previous footnote for my indebtedness to Jan Owns, who is writing a book on the White Clay Creek and its preservation. The then new pesticide D.D.T. was promoted by business and the government and widely used from 1939 to 1972, when it was finally banned as a result of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (1962), and a public protest environmental movement.

²⁴ Mary Chambers Folwell,“History of the Chambers Family,” 41.

²⁵ Folwell, “History of the Chambers Family,” 41; plus John Whiteclay Chambers II, “The Chambers Family of ‘Hilltop,’” White Clay Creek Association Newsletter, Fall 1989, 11.

²⁶ Folwell, “History of the Chambers Family” 42; Robinson Interviews, July 2005 through March 2006, by Andrea Cassel, et al., 2004-2005, page 15.

²⁷ Folwell, “History of the Chambers Family,” 1-42.

²⁸ The children of P. Donald Folwell and Mary Chambers Folwell were Nathan T. Folwell, Jr. (1906-1987); Mary Kemble Folwell (Mrs. Hyde Ballard) (1908--); Katrina R. Folwell (1912-1927); Jean Harned Folwell (Mrs. John Kenneth Clinton) (1914-1994); Phyllis D. Folwell (1921--); and William H. Folwell (1924-1997).

²⁹ The Folwell woolen textile mills, making woolens and worsteds for men and women’s clothing was located over an entire block at North 3rd and Cambria Streets in the Fair Hills section of North Philadelphia.

³⁰ “News of London Britain,” Newark Post, July 20, 1950, 3. I am indebted to Kathleen N. Sullivan for calling my attention to this article.

³¹ “Philip Folwell Dies at Age 74,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 3, 1955 10; “P.D. Folwell Dies,” Allentown, Pa. Morning Call, Dec. 6, 1955, 33, after leaving Folwell Bros., woolen clothing manufacturers, Folwell had become vice president of Zollinger-Harned Co. a large department store in Allentown, 63 miles north of Philadelphia.

³² Mary Chambers Folwell, unpublished “History of the Chambers Family,” Ch. 3, pp. 41-42, Chambers Family Papers (Collection 1939) Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.

³³ Chambers, “Chambers Family of ‘Hilltop,’” White Clay Creek Association Newsletter, Fall 1989, 12; and interviews with Anne Murray, April 5, 2020; and her oldest son, John D. (“Jack”) Murray, April 17, 2020, interviewed by John Whiteclay Chambers II,.

³⁴ Dates of the barn fire in Joseph (“Joe”) Allmond, interview April 22, 2020. He remembered his parents telling him about the barn fire; and Anne Murray on the date of the house fire in her interview April 12, 2020, both interviews with John Whiteclay Chambers II. Anne Murray recalled the precise date that the house burned down, January 12, 1960, because that was also the day she gave birth to her youngest daughter. Her husband saw the fire that night as he drove home from visiting her at the hospital.

³⁵ Deed from Rhoda Chambers Ware and William M. Ware, to John Whiteclay Chambers [II] Deed, July 29, 1966, for 3.8 acres, currently 791 Chambers Rock Road, Landenberg, London Britain Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in possession of John White Chambers II.

³⁶ See, for example, recent sale of 1 Bill’s Way, Landenberg, Pa., 19350, by Berkshire Hathaway, https://www.homesale.com/p/1-Bills-Way-Landenberg-PA-19350/dmgsid_36203905, accessed, April 30, 2020.

³⁷ Jan Owens of Newark has spent many years researching the White Clay Creek and the citizens’ movement that resulted in its preservation. She is currently writing a history of the White Clay Creek Valley and its preservation, and I am intensely grateful to Jan Owens for generously sharing some of her resulting understanding and insights with me in several conversations, emails and photographs since February 2020. Additional information on the preservation movement, also came from Kathleen N. Sullivan, Naturalist/Environmental Educator, at Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, interview with John Whiteclay Chambers II, May 26, 2020, and email of May 28, 2020; plus the testimony found by the present author of Dorothy P. Miller, board member of the White Clay Creek Association, and others in U.S. Senate Hearings in 1992 that led to the inclusion of White Clay Creek and its tributaries in the National Wild and Scenic River System in 2000, Ms. Miller’s testimony is printed in Miscellaneous Wild and Scenic River National Battlefield, and Public Land Measures: Hearing before the Sub-Committee on Public Land, National Parks and Forests of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, United States Senate, 102nd Congress, 1st Session on S. 461, S606, S. 1230, HR.990, S. 1552, S. 1660 S. 1770, S. 1772, H.R., 2370, Nov. 7, 1991, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), especially pages 75-77, on Senate Bill 1772 to include White Clay Creek as a federal wild and scenic river. The present author also was briefly involved from 1989-1991 in the White Clay Watershed Association’s efforts to expand conservation of the Valley through the White Clay Conservancy, attending the organizational conference at the University of Delaware, December 9, 1989; Newark News Journal, Dec. 8, 1989, B4; and corresponding with and receiving letters from John A. (“Jack”) Murray, Oct. 14 and 22, 1989, and Eugene C. (“Dick”) Robinson, chair of the White Clay Creek Preserve Bi-State Advisory Committee, Oct. 26, Nov. 8, and 14, 1990, and Jan. 28, 1991. In addition to the citizens’ movement that resulted in the preservation of the White Clay Creek Valley, two big auto plants and a paper plant left Newark, reducing expected water demand. Du Pont Company abandoned its plan for a dam and reservoir and turned instead to pumping water over the hill to Newark, which met the area’s actual water needs.

³⁸ “Du Pont Co. Donates Park Land: 1,200 Acres in County Included,” West Chester Daily Local News, June 27, 1984; “Du Pont Gives Land for Park,” Wilmington Morning News, Jun 27, 1984, 1. See also www.destateparks.com/whiteclaycreek and www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateParks/FindAPark?WhiteClayCreekPreserve. Both accessed June 24, 2020.

³⁹ www.destateparks.com/whiteclaycreek. Accessed June 24, 2020. National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, “Chambers House,” Creek Road, Newark, New Castle County, Delaware, Site N-6770, October 19, 1988, Section 8, page 3.