 |
Sign at the corner of Chambers Rock
Road and New London Road, 1972 |
I'm thrilled and proud to be able to share with you another Guest Post by John Whiteclay Chambers II, retired professor and former chair of the History Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. John, a descendant of the Chambers Family of the western Mill Creek/northern White Clay Creek Hundred area, shared with us recently a post on
Restoring the Chambers Family Farm in the 20th Century. In this latest article he tells us about the origins of the names "Chambers Rock" and "Chambers' Rocks", how they are actually referring to different things, and how one of the names was used for a wonderful piece of 19th Century history that I had been completely unaware of. I hope you enjoy it, and tremendous thanks go to John for writing and sharing this with us! And note, the extensive and extremely informative footnotes are located at the end of the post.
Behemoth in White Clay Creek:
Chambers Rock and Its Complex Legacy
By John Whiteclay Chambers II
Excerpt from John Whiteclay Chambers II, “The Chambers Family of Hilltop,” Copyright © 2021. Do not replicate without written permission from the author.
* John Whiteclay Chambers II retired from Rutgers University in 2017 as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History and a former Chair of the History Department. He welcomes comments on the subject of this article. <john.chambers@rutgers.edu.>
“People say where is Chambers Rock?” says Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist at White Clay Creek State Park in Delaware. “They disagree over whether there is one rock, or if that is the name of the farm because there were so many rocks around it.”¹ She was referring to a former farm owned for generations by the Chambers family, a small part of which is now a development called “Chambers Rock Farm.”²
People also know of the rock from “Chambers Rock Road,” a country road that runs through the old farm located on the state line between Delaware and Pennsylvania. Is there a “Chambers Rock”? There is, but to many people, its name and the name’s complex and varied history remain a mystery.
The derivation of the name seems forgotten—except by some of those who lived nearby. “It was common knowledge among people who lived on Chambers Rock Road that there was a Rock and there had been a picnic ground years ago,” said Anne Murray, who lived on “Pennview” farm on that road from 1957 to 2000. Growing up nearby in the 1950s and 1960s in a house on Thompson Station Road that is now the Delaware Park’s headquarters, Joe Allmond also recalled it. “I remember the name,” he said, “and I remember hearing, ‘Oh, it’s called Chambers Rock Farm because of the Rock.’”³
Confusingly the actual origins reveal that historically, the official names of the picnic ground, the farm and the road, were actually “Chambers Rocks” plural. They were named, not after the big rock, but after a now long forgotten stone quarry on the Chambers’ farm property all of which were not far from each other along White Clay Creek. Later, in the twentieth century, as will be shown, “Chambers Rocks Farms,” plural, was the name for the farms rebuilt and managed by Mary Chambers Folwell from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s. The road running through that farm became officially, and temporarily, “Chambers Rocks Road,” plural. But now the farm is long gone, and that plural designation has disappeared. Today, that two-lane way is currently named “Chambers Rock Road,” singular. Because of the quandary of whether the origin is singular or plural, it may be best to begin with the Rock itself.
Chambers Rock
A few steps down off a dirt trail, the old Creek Road, along White Clay Creek by what was once the Chambers farm, lies a giant flat surfaced rock, the largest boulder in the stream. Angling out of the bank, its exposed surface, stabs halfway across the stream. Its mostly smooth surface is scarred by shallow finger-like crevices, called layers. Depending on the light, it can appear gray or black. “It’s as big as a king-size bed—or bigger!” exclaimed Jan Owens, author of a forthcoming book on the preservation of White Clay Creek Valley.⁴ Indeed, the surface could be perhaps twenty-five feet long by twenty feet wide. Geologically, the boulder is believed to be amphibolite, a dark, fine-grained, metamorphic stone, composed of amphibole and plagioclase feldspar. Geologists estimate its present composition at 500 to 520 million years old.*
There is a mystery to it too, or more precisely to a heavy iron ring and the steel pin that, at one time, anchored the ring about two feet from the point of the rock in the stream. “It wasn’t put there by an amateur,” Said David Gray, a retired chemist raised in the area in the mid-twentieth century. But who did put the pin and ring there and why?
Perhaps it was the railroad engineers in the nineteenth century who built the Pomeroy and Newark Railroad between Delaware and Pennsylvania running alongside, and often crossing, White Clay Creek. Maybe the ring partially secured a small pedestrian bridge used by the laborers on that job since the access road was on this western, side. Or maybe it was to moor a small, shallow boat. At least two stories about a possible mooring for a small craft have come down. One in Chambers family lore suggests it may have been for a small skiff used to transport runaway slaves far enough down the creek to throw the tracking dogs off the scent. As Quakers the Chambers were against slavery and records show that John W. Chambers (1816-1869), owner of Hillside and later Hilltop and an officer in the Bank of Newark, was administrator of the estate of William Garrett, presumably a relative of Thomas Garrett famed Wilmington station master on the Underground Railroad. More recently, the daughter of a mechanic who worked on Chambers Rocks Farms in the 1950s, said her father was told that Mr. Chambers (presumably John W. Chambers, 1816-1869) had found that rocking in the creek in a small boat tied to the rock proved an effective way to calm an agitated, ailing child, his daughter (undoubtedly his and Mary Jane Kemble Chambers’ daughter, Mary Chambers, 1853-1878, who suffered from Bright’s degenerative disease). Despite such possible explanations, the initial purpose of the ring in the rock remains historically unproven and thus, still a mystery. It is known, however, from photographs held by the Folwell branch of the Chambers family, that fully dressed ladies, at church picnics in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century held onto a rope tied from the rock to a tree on the opposite shore to prevent slipping in the stream.⁵ When David Gray returned with his grandchildren around 2010, several decades after he had used the beach in the 1950s, both the iron ring and the steel pin were gone. “Somebody sawed it off, which to me is heresy,” Gray said. “It was a piece of history.”⁶ Who did that and why also remains a mystery. Today, only a less than inch-high remnant of the sawed-off pin remains.
Since White Clay Creek pools as it arrives at Chambers Rock, the site became, for a long time, a favorite place for dipping. “We used to go swimming and cooling off in the creek,” remembered Rob Sadot of Delaware, recalling that young people had called the site “Reflections,” because the sky and pool’s surface mirrored the sky.⁷ Since the Rock’s broad surface slopes perhaps twenty degrees downward to the water, children could belly slide down it for a thrilling plunge, one mother recalled. But after the Du Pont Company donated the land to the two states in 1984, to preserve, Pennsylvania prohibited swimming in its White Clay Creek State Preserve, where the Rock and the pool are located today. “The [Pennsylvania] park rangers shooed us out saying, ‘You can’t swim here,’” David Gray discovered, “I was so angry.” But downstream, Delaware allows swimming in its White Clay Creek State Park. Despite the differences, both states allow fishing, and the idyllic pooling spot is a favorite of fly-fishing individuals and clubs during trout season.⁸
 |
White Clay Creek State Park (DE) sign pointing
the way to Chambers Rock (in PA) |
Because it was so large and protrudes so far into the creek, the Big Rock, located on what was once the Chambers family farm, became a landmark in White Clay Creek. “It’s always been called Chambers Rock, as far as I can remember,” declared Jim Hill, whose Boy Scout troop made many hikes up the Creek Road trail in the 1960s.⁹ Today, prominent signs on Chambers Rock Road at the beginning of Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, just before the bridge and the Park headquarters, indicates a trail upstream to “Chambers Rock.” Consequently many people now call the boulder “Chambers Rock.”¹⁰ But in the past, people have known it by many different names. It has also been called “Turtle Rock," and “David Sat Rock,” for example. The former may have resulted from many turtles sunning themselves on the sloped boulder, latter refers to a curious legend, in several guidebooks, about a boy named David who became separated from his parents in the woods was finally found sitting calmly on the Big Rock waiting for them. One variation holds that it happened in colonial times, and after a futile search, the boy’s parents, pioneers in a horse and wagon, decided to continue on with his siblings on the long journey to a new home. In modern times, some guides in the Pennsylvania Preserve like to encourage visitors, especially around Halloween, to peer through the cool haze over the creek and imagine a faint image of the boy still sitting, waiting on the Big Rock.¹¹ “Chambers Rock,” “Turtle Rock,” “David Sat Rock,” even just the “Big Rock,” all reflect the fascination with the Behemoth in White Clay Creek on Chambers Farm for more than two hundred years at least.¹²
Chambers Rocks (plural) Quarry
“Chambers Rock” is indeed the biggest rock in White Clay Creek, but there are other rocks of varying size in this area. There may have been more such rocks before a stone quarry began operating on Chambers farm property by the creek in the nineteenth century.¹³ Some rocks may have been harvested from the creek, but apparently most of the quarrying took place in a wooded ravine about 300 hundred feet upstream from Chambers Rock. There an important tributary still flows down from steep hills into the bottom of the ravine. Plunging 45-degrees, its surging waters can, after a particularly heavy rain, wash out the culvert supporting the trail beside the creek. An indentation still faintly visible in the ravine’s northern slope is believed to be the only remnant of the quarry that harvested “Chambers rocks.” Francis (“Frank”) Cornell, a London Britain Township Supervisor during the 1970s and 1980s, reports that stone quarry on the Chambers’ property was the origin of the name “Chambers Rocks,” plural.¹⁴
What are those rocks along the creek? Geologists explain that some of them are amphibolite, like “Chambers Rock,” but many others are gneiss (“nice”), a metamorphic stone of hardened, transformed sediment fused with quartz- and clay-rich layers, also compressed into its final form some 500 million years ago.** The quantity of rock taken by the “Chambers Rocks Quarry” is unknown. But the use of such rocks is quite familiar. Hard and heavy amphibolite is often employed as ballast stone for anchoring railroad ties or building highways. High quality black or dark gray amphibolite, on the other hand, provides floor tiles, panels or facings. Gneiss, being lighter gray, is often used for floors, counters and gravestones. But gneiss may have also been used in building many of the stone houses in the area.
Chambers Rocks Picnic Ground
“Chambers Rocks Picnic Ground” (Rocks plural) was created along the creek a bit north of the quarry and Chambers Rock by David McCausland Chambers. He built a few years after the death in 1869 of his brother, John W. Chambers, while David and his wife were visiting John’s widow, Mary Jane Kemble Chambers, who was running the farm. That summer, it was reported that the local Delaware-Pennsylvania railroad, a freight line, would begin carrying passengers as well in 1873.¹⁵ A wealthy dry goods merchant in Philadelphia and Camden, David McCausland Chambers may have seen an economic opportunity to increase the farm’s income by offering town and city people an enjoyable summer outing in the country at a picnic ground along an idyllic, tree-lined creek. On a flat, picturesque spot on Chambers property, with the help of a neighbor, David Chambers directed the building of fifteen tables and benches, ordered the redirection of part of the tributary to form a wading pool, and had a trail cut through to a beach. There was a bathhouse not to far downstream.¹⁶ His creation became known as “Chambers Rocks Picnic Grounds.”¹⁷ There really was only wading at this point of the creek, but for swimming and diving, neighborhood kids, and after the advent of the automobile, young people from surrounding towns came down to use real swimming holes downstream by the bridges over Chambers Rock and Hopkins Bridge Roads.¹⁸
 |
| David McCausland Chambers (1820-1904) |
Perhaps a hundred yards down a dirt wagon trail named Creek Road, running alongside the creek, a hiking trail beside a tributary led up the ravine to “Hilltop.” The Chambers’ 1851 three-story manor house is located today off Chambers Rock Road on Bill’s Way. Supplies were brought down to the picnic area. There picnickers could enjoy the facilities and amenities, presumably for a fee, or at least a chance to purchase food, beverages and other supplies from Chambers farms. Day trippers could eat and relax in the rustic glade, swim or fish in the creek or ponds, stroll along the wooded trails, or just lie in the sun on the sandy beach. On May 1, 1873, when the railroad began regularly carrying passengers, Chambers Rocks Picnic Ground was ready for them. Passengers could detrain two miles south at Thompson’s Station in Delaware, which was next to the Chambers farms of “Hillvale, ”Pennview,” and “Hillside” and “Hilltop.” A dirt wagon trail, Creek Road, built in 1859,¹⁹ led to the picnic ground was more than a mile upstream. Along the dirt road, not too far north of the station, David Chambers had also created a “watering stone,” with fresh spring water for horses and walkers.²⁰ Later, the railroad added Yeatman’s Station near London Tract Road in Pennsylvania, which was much closer to the picnic ground.
 |
The area that once hosted Chambers Rocks Picnic Grounds, as it looks today
|
“A more beautiful place could not be found,” a reporter for the Wilmington Daily Commercial opined about the picnic ground in August 1874, “being 4 ½ miles from Newark, and owned by Mr. [David] Chambers.”²¹ The picnic ground was quite a triumph. This was not surprising, as David McCausland Chambers ran a successful wholesale dry goods business in Philadelphia and Camden, as well as being a major philanthropist.²²
The quiet, picturesque stretch along Creek Road, where the picnic ground was located, also had another name. “Lover’s Lane,” or “Lover’s Retreat,” the locals often called it.²³ Whatever the nighttime activities, the “sparking” as some old-timers called it, the flat, shaded picnic ground by the creek proved very poplar for daytime activities as well. Scores of picnickers, sometime up to two hundred or more, attended church or school excursions there, according to local newspapers. “It was a famous picnic area for church groups” in the late eighteenth century asserted Eugene C. (“Dick”) Robinson, a local resident starting in the 1950s, in a series of interviews for Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park in the early 2000s. “I have seen photographs of church groups swimming in the hole.”²⁴ Long after the railroad abandoned passenger service in 1928, local people and others continued to arrive by automobile for picnics and other summer outings.²⁵ As a youth in the 1960s and 1970s, young Bonnie Franςois from nearby Strickersville was one of many people whose family and friends often held picnics there, but she and most other people had never heard it called either “Chambers Rock” or “Chambers Rocks” Picnic Ground.”²⁶ In 1984, officials of London Britain Township used the site for the formal dedication of Pennsylvania’s new White Clay Creek Preserve.²⁷
 |
1906 postcard with the caption, "View on White Clay Creek
at Lovers Retreat, Near Newark, Delaware" |
“I so well remember it, as my first girl friend and I loung[ed] in the sandy soil near the creek, eating our picnic lunch, in the summer of ’58,” David Gray reminisced in 2020. “And then I rushed her to my Delaware home so that she could wash with Fels-Naptha to get rid of the poison ivy.”²⁸ Creek Road, the former “Lover’s Lane,” is no longer open to vehicles in Pennsylvania’s White Clay Creek Preserve. It is now the PennDel Trail.²⁹
Chambers Rocks Farm and Chambers Rocks Road
In the first half of the twentieth century, the name “Chambers Rocks,” plural, was used for the old farm resurrected and run profitably as “Chambers Rocks Farms,” (both Rocks and Farms plural), by Mary Chambers Folwell. A granddaughter of John W. and Mary Jane Kemble Chambers, she married a wealthy Philadelphia manufacturer, P. Donald Folwell in 1904. She spent summers at “Hilltop” managing a prize-winning herd of purebred Jersey cattle and building their ownership eventually to 515 acres along the creek on both sides of the Delaware-Pennsylvania state line. The story of how she built the profitable farm and restored to the family 78 per cent of the 664-acre tract purchased in 1720 by John Chambers, the English Quaker immigrant, from William Penn’s family, has been previously posted on The Mill Creek Hundred History Blog by the present author.³⁰
 |
Mary Chambers Folwell’s stationery asserted “Chambers’ Rocks Farms,” but local residents
preferred the singular “Chambers Rock” for the road and the farms |
But most relevant here is that Mary Chambers Folwell renamed Chambers farm, the “Chambers Rocks Farm,” plural, when she ran it from the 1920s through the 1950s.³¹ Simultaneously, the dirt county lane through the farm originating from before 1849, and possibly known as an eastern section of the “Strickersville Road,” was modernized for automobiles in 1928, including Delaware’s replacing the wooden covered bridge across the creek with a metal truss bridge, and Pennsylvania and London Britain Township surfacing the former dirt road, and renaming it as “Chambers Rocks Road,” plural, because of the rebuilt and renamed “Chambers Rocks Farm."³² When a granddaughter asked Mary Chambers Folwell directly in the early 1940s, if her name for the farms, “Chambers Rocks Farms,” had any connection to the Big Rock in the creek, she emphatically said it had none.³³ Apparently, therefore, the plural name surely came from either “Chambers Rocks Picnic Ground” then still being used, or the vanished “Chambers Rocks Quarry,” or both. But the plural name proved difficult for local people and even the newspapers to remember. Instead the people consistently, and local newspapers mostly, used the easier singular version “Chambers Rock Road” and “Chambers Rock Farm.”³⁴
The death of Mary Chambers Folwell’s husband in December 1955, led her to quickly divide and sell all the Chambers land she had acquired, even “Chambers House” in Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park.³⁵ With the end of “Chambers Rocks Farm,” plural, London Britain Township changed the designation of the road once again. “Chambers Rocks Road,” plural, was scrapped in 1955, in favor of the familiar locally used name, “Chambers Rock Road,” singular, which is still its official name.³⁶
Conclusion
Particularly because the local past is often forgotten in mobile America, this journey back in time has sought to uncover the origin and the meaning of certain local names—like “Chambers Rock” and “Chambers Rock Road”—on the arc part of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Delaware, What was discovered is that first came the plural term “Rocks.” The long forgotten ones of “Chambers Rocks Quarry” by White Clay Creek, rather than the stones up on the hillside farmland, were the basis for the plural names of the old quarry and the nearby picnic ground in the nineteenth century.
But with the demise of the quarry, the reason for a plural name for the picnic ground and perhaps the farm disappeared. Mary Chambers Folwell had sought to reestablish the plural version (“Chambers Rocks”) for the farm and the modernized road in the first half of the twentieth century. But without the quarry, the earlier justification had disappeared, and the public did not accept it. Instead, local consensus eventually led to the official designation “Chambers Rock Road,” singular, by the township and suburban developers accepted that for the houses they erected near Hilltop manor, calling their development “Chambers Rock Farm.”
Ever enduring, of course, was ancient behemoth down on the creek, and especially with a road named “Chambers Rock,” the boulder itself needed to be restored to its current prominent designation. The origins of the rock, the road, the picnic ground and the farm, are certainly worth preserving. The are all part of the history of the now preserved scenic river with its timbered banks, its beauty accompanied by the adjacent rolling hills, lush farmland and many historic houses and other structures of the treasured White Clay Creek Valley.***
Footnotes:
¹Kathleen Sullivan, Naturalist/Environmental Educator, Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, interview, May 26, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II.
²For the “Chambers Rock Farm,” singular, development of houses on the old “Hilltop” Chambers Farm on the north side of Chambers Rock Road,” see, for example, the 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, and 14 Anne’s Way, https://www.homesale.com/s/pa/landenberg-city/chambers-rock-farm-subdivision, accessed July 29, 2020. The Bill of Bill’s Way, was William Folwell, youngest son of P. Donald and Mary Chambers Folwell, the former owner of that part of the farm. Ann’s Way is named after Bill’s wife.
³Anne Murray, interview, April 15, 2020 (the third in a series of three interviews, beginning April 5, 2020) with John Whiteclay Chambers II; Joseph (“Joe”) Allmond, interview, April 22, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II.
⁴Jan Owens, phone conversation, June 2, 2020, with the present author, confirmed in email of June 3, 2020.
*For their invaluable assistance and providing me with more information that I could have hoped for about this rock and others in the area, I am indebted to Gale C. Blackmer, Ph.D., P.G., Pennsylvania State Geologist and Director of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey; and William (“Sandy”) Schenck, P.G., of the Delaware Geological Survey and the University of Delaware. I am also indebted to my longtime friend, N. Susan McClees, holder of degrees in geology and musicology from the University of California, Berkeley, and lifelong explorer of the geology of the West, for her help as well. Local resident Jerry Darke provided invaluable photographs of the rock in various seasons and lighting.
⁵Underground Railroad connection: “History of the tenuous connection [of Hilltop and John W. Chambers] to the Underground Railroad,” in Barbe Ballard Breylinger (granddaughter of Mary Chambers Folwell, and cousin of the present author), “History of the Chambers Family of Delaware,” typescript 2008, Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington, Delaware, I am obligated to curator Edward Richie for copying the typescript for me in the pandemic filled summer of 2020. On calming an agitated, ailing daughter: Bonnie Franςois Bupp, daughter of (“Frenchie”) Franςois of Strickersville, Pennsylvania, interview with John Whiteclay Chambers II, May 26, 2021. On Mary Chambers the continually ailing daughter of John W. and Mary Jane Kemble Chambers, who died at age 25, see Barbara R. Thompson, What Love Can Do, A Journey of Four Hundred Years: A History of the Chambers-Ware Family, 1600-2006 A.D., 2 vols. (Decatur, Ga.: Pathways Communications Group,, 2006), II, 192. On ladies holding a rope wading: 1950s tenant and friend of Chambers Rocks Farms owner Mary Chambers Folwell, Eugene (“Dick”) Robinson said later that she had shown him photos of 19the century church picnics and “there was a hawser rope anchored from the flat rock [perhaps from or through the iron ring] to the other side of the creek The ladies would hold on to the rope in the ripples while standing on the rock[s].” Eugene “Dick” Robinson Interviews, July 2005 through March 2006. I am grateful to Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist at Delaware’s White Clay Creek for sending me a summary of the interviews, email January 28, 2021.
⁶David Gray, interview, April 24, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II; the current existence of just the empty hole, David Gray, email, June 17, 2020. In Anne Murray’s interview, April 15, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II (the third of three interviews beginning April 5, 2020), she also remembered from the 1950s and 1960s that the Rock had an iron ring in it. She thought it was there perhaps to tie up a boat. Brian Thompson, Sr., also remembered the iron ring, post in the Memories of Newark Face Book Group, Joe Allmond, an administrator of the Group, to the present author, June 11, 2020.
⁷Robert (“Rob”) Sadot, emails, June 19 and 27, 2020, to the present author.
⁸David Gray, interview, April 24, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II, for the quotation; and Pennsylvania Preserve Naturalist Gary Stolz and Delaware Park Naturalist Kathleen Sullivan, emails July 3, 2020, to the present author on whether swimming is permitted in their state’s preserve or park, and Gary Stolz, Aug. 10, 2020 on adjacent to Peltier Road/Creek Road.
⁹Harold James Hill, 66, owner of Hill’s Auction House, in an interview with John Whiteclay Chambers II, January 26, 2021. Jim Hill’s father, Harold S. Hill (1924-2008), longtime auctioneer and resident of the area, also served for years as a permit official for the local government of London Britain Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Local residents Anne Murray and Joe Allmond also knew it was called “Chambers Rock,” in the 1950s and after, although Joe Allmond also heard it called “David Sat Rock.” Anne Murray and Joseph Allmond interviewed in April 2020, by John Whiteclay Chambers II.
¹⁰It was always called “Chambers Rock” in the Chambers family branch of which the present author is a member. He heard it from his father, John McCausland Chambers, whose sister, Rhoda Chambers Ware later told the same story to Barbara Thompson, What Love Can Do: A Journey of Four Hundred Years A History of the Chambers/Ware Family 166-2006 A.D, 2 vols. (Decatur, Ga.: Pathway Communications Group, 2006), Vol. II, p. 198.
¹¹The David Sat legend was already well enough known in the mid-twentieth century, that it was included in a pamphlet promoting interesting sites in the area, the Women’s Alliance of the Unitarian Church of Newark, Delaware Around the Edge of the Wedge (Newark, Del.: The Unitarian Fellowship, n.d., but estimated to be mid-century), 5. I am grateful to Joseph (“Joe”) Allmond, who grew up near Thompson’s Station in the 1950s and 1960s, and who heard that the boulder was called “Chambers Rock,” but also heard the rock called “David Sat Rock,” and who told the present author, April 26 and May 28, 2020, that several members of his Memories of Newark Group on Face Book, also mentioned it as the “David Sat Rock.” The pamphlet was from his father’s papers. For a recent publication of the David Sat legend, see Boyd Newman and Linda A. Newman, Hikes Around Philadelphia (Phila., Pa.: Temple University Press, 2000). Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist/guide at White Clay Creek State Park in Delaware, in an interview, May 26, 2020; and her counterpart Gary Stolz at White Clay Creek Preserve in Pennsylvania, in a similar interview, May 29, 2020, both told the present author that they know of the David Sat legend and have explained it to visitors. Marilyn P. Flannerty, a former naturalist/guide at the Preserve, 2005-2009, who learned the legend from her predecessor, also provided the part about guides and Halloween, in her interview with the present author, August 29, 2020.
¹²Anne Murray, Joe Allmond, David Gray, and Jack Murray, all of whom had lived in the area In the 1950s and 1960s, and several of them later as well, all denied ever hearing the Big Rock called “Turtle Rock.” Anne Murray knew that it was the Chambers Rock of Chambers Rock Road. Anne Murray said everyone on Chambers Rock Road in the 1950s and 1960s knew that. But David Gray did not know the rock had any name, and John D. (“Jack”) Murray, Anne and John A. Murray’s son, did not think it did either. In fact, he said of the kids on Chambers Rock Road We [young boys] did not have a specific name for the rock…[just] the rock on Creek Road,” Jack Murray, in an email to the present author, June 28, 2020. Joe Allmond knew it was the rock of Chambers Rock Road, but he remembered hearing it more often referred to as the “David Sat Rock.” Anne Murray, Joe Almond, David Gray and Jack Murray, interviews and correspondence in the spring and summer of 2020 with John Whiteclay Chambers II. Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist and environmental interpreter at Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, heard it called “Chambers Rock,” but “more people refer to that as Turtle Rock,” interview, May 26, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II, and email of June 17, 2020. Frank Cornell, a London Britain Township supervisor in the 1970s and 1980s, said the rock was called “Chambers Rock.” Frank Cornell, interview Sept. 22, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II. In the Chambers family, the title “Chambers Rock” for the Big Rock came down in family lore to the present author.
¹³
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. On Elwood Wilkins, see, for example, his co-authored booklet, The House on the Kirby Tract: Better Known as Carson’s or the Buck Tavern, 1976, 69 pages printed, Archaeological Society of Delaware Records, University of Delaware, https://library.udel.edu/special/findaids/view?ocId=easd/mss0578.xml;tab=content. Accessed Sept. 30, 2020. Jim Hill, 66, owner of Hill’s Auction House in Kemblesville, added “I heard a little something about it [Chambers Rocks Quarry],” but he was much more familiar with the still evident old limestone quarries in the area, including the one off the end of Sharpless Road. The remains of that quarry are still quite visible. Harold James Hill, interview January 26, 2020, with John Whiteclay Chambers II. Other quarries on local farmers’ property were mainly for limestone. Evan before the Civil War, David Evans, had a lime quarry near Strickersville, and Joshua Sharpless, had a lime quarry and kiln, near Yeatman’s Mill, and there were others as well. Chester County Road Papers Supplemental Index, 1701-1873, London Britain Township, Vol. 53, pp. 104-106; Vol. 57, p. 11, https://www.chesco.org/DocumentCenter/View/6581/Road-Papers-Supplemental-Index-1701-1873-H-O?bidId=accessed January 7, 2021. In 1933, Joseph Eastburn 86, and his cousin, Horace Eastburn recalled stories of the Eastburn family farms with their lime quarries and kilns in neighboring Mill Creek Hundred since around 1800 before which the Black family ran both the quarries and the farm. The Eastburn Quarries ended around 1900 with the development of the great quarries in Pennsylvania, western Maryland and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Francis A. Cooch, “Eastburn’s Quarries,” Newark Post, Nov. 6, 1933, 2.
¹⁴Frank Cornell, interviews of Sept. 22, 24, 2020 by John Whiteclay Chambers II. I am indebted to Jerry Darke, a member of the London Britain Township Historical Commission, who lives at the top of the hill above the ravine, for photographs of the ravine and the indentation, as well as statistics about the tributary.
**Again, I am indebted, for their geological assistance, to Gale C. Blackmer, Ph.D., P.G., Pennsylvania State Geologist and Director of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey; and William (“Sandy”) Schenck, P.G., of the Delaware Geological Survey and the University of Delaware; and also to my longtime friend, N. Susan McClees, holder of degrees in geology and musicology from the University of California at Berkeley, and lifelong explorer of the geology of the West.
¹⁵
The Delaware and Pennsylvania Railroad, which later became the Pomeroy and Newark Railroad, crossing and re-crossing White Clay Creek, sixty-five times on wooden bridges always in search of easier right-of-way, was built between approximately 1868 and 1873. The aim was to provide an alternative route to the congested railroad hub of Philadelphia. Bypassing that sometimes ice-bound river port, the new railroad was originally built to haul freight from the upstate coalfields to ice-free, port of Delaware City on Delaware Bay. It carried coal and other freight between Pomeroy, Pennsylvania, site of a steel mill, just north of Coatesville, the steel town, on the main east-west line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Newark, 26 miles south, plus subsequently Port Delaware, a total of 39 miles. It also served small town stations along the way, delivering mail, dry goods and other supplies to country stores and picking up lumber, fruit, milk, clay for kaolin ceramics, and other commodities for wider markets. Coal fired steam locomotives pulled the freight cars. In 1872, for added revenue, railroad officials obtained a contract to carry the U.S. mail daily and decided to add passenger service. , popularly nicknamed the “Pumpsie Doodle” or “Pommy Diddle,” on the Pomeroy and Newark run. The car operated twice a day beginning in May 1873. See M. E. Small, “The Pomeroy and Newark Railroad—the Pumpsy Doodle,” Highline—Journal of the Pennsylvania Technical and Historical Society (1990-1991); Jack Hill, The Pomeroy and Newark Railroad: The Railroad That Should Never Have Been Built (Middletown, Del: n.p., 2020); and Katherine Evers, “P&N Railroad of White Clay Creek,” Delaware State Parks Adventure Blog, May 11, 2020, on https://destateparks.blog/2020/05/11pn-railroad-of-white-clay-creek, accessed June 22, 2020.
¹⁶David McCausland Chambers was helped in building the picnic ground by a neighbor, Samuel Corlies, see Mary Chambers Folwell, “History of the Chambers Family,” 1959, Ch. 3, pp. 39-40. According to the oral history of Eugene C. (“Dickie”) Robinson, who knew Mary Chambers Folwell in the 1950s, the Chambers had built about 15 picnic tables there and the family was very proud of it and its use by the community. Eugene “Dick” Robinson Interview, July 2005, through March 2006, page 12, by Andrea Cassel, et al., I am grateful to Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist at Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park for sending a copy to me, January 28, 2021. A 1873 map of London Britain and Franklin Townships, Chester County, Pennsylvania, shows that S. Fisher Corlies’ 175-acre property bordered Chambers farm, but seems to indicate that it did not border White Clay Creek, as the Chambers property did. The map also shows a “bath house” on a creek in between two farm roads leading down from the Chambers’ house is shown on H.F. Bridgen, A.R. Wittmer, et al, Atlas of Chester County, Pennsylvania, from Actual Surveys (Lancaster, Pa: A.R. Wittmer, 1873), unpaginated, page showing Franklin & London Britain Townships.
¹⁷There have been differences in the wider Chambers family over whether it was called Chambers Rock Picnic Ground (Rock singular) or Chambers Rocks Picnic Ground (Rocks plural). In the branch of the Chambers family descended from George R. Chambers, a son of John W. and Mary Jane Kemble Chambers, John Whiteclay Chambers II remembers hearing the story of “Uncle David,” (actually great-great uncle David) and Chambers Rock Picnic Ground (singular) as he grew up. See, John Whiteclay Chambers II, “The Chambers Family of Hilltop,” White Clay Watershed Association Newsletter, Fall 1989, 10-12. His aunt, Rhoda Chambers Ware, had a similar recollection, see Thompson, What Love Can Do, II, p. 198. However, in the Folwell branch of the Chambers family (descendants of Samuel K. Chambers, an older son of John W. and Mary Jane Kemble Chambers), it has been remembered differently as “Chambers Rocks Picnic Ground” (plural). See, for example, Mary Chambers Folwell, “granddaughter of Mary Jane Kemble Chambers (1818-1906), in her, 1959, unpublished “History of the Chambers Family,” Ch. 3, pp. 39-40, excerpts in possession of the present author, with the entire typescript in the Chambers Family Papers (Collection 139), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., ; and emphasized even more emphatically by Barbe Ballard Breylinger, granddaughter of Mary Ballard Chambers Folwell, in Barbe Breylinger’s “History of the Chambers Family of Delaware,” typed family notes, including her grandmother’s absolute denial to her years earlier that the Big Rock had anything to do with the name Chambers Rocks, plus a document with the stationary letterhead “Chambers Rocks Farm: Breeders of Jersey Cattle,” included in an unpaginated, spiral bound volume, 2003-2008, at the Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, Delaware. I am grateful to Edward Richi, curator of printed media, for copying and sending to me this history, when the Historical Society was closed to researchers and others during the corona virus pandemic of 2020-21. After reading my cousin Barbe Ballard Breylinger’s notes in August 2020, and doing additional research, including the information provided to me by Francis (“Frank”) Cornell, former supervisor London Britain Township about the quarry and Chambers Rocks Road (plural), the present author has become convinced that “Chambers Rocks Picnic Ground,” (plural) was probably historically correct.
¹⁸The use of those swimming holes was remembered by many people, including Seaver A. Ballard, a cousin of Mary Ballard Chambers Folwell, who worked on her farm in the 1920s, in a letter to John Whiteclay Chambers II, Nov. 5, 1989; for memories of those swimming holes in the 1950s and 1960s, plus a secret one in between the two bridges known only to neighborhood kids, see interviews with John Whiteclay Chambers II in April and May 2020 by Joe Allmond, David Gray, and Jack Murray, plus Eugene “Dick” Robinson interviews July 2005 through March 2006 with Andrea Cassel, et al, for Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, page 13.
¹⁹Samuel K. Chambers, a student at Westtown from Chambers farm at that time, recalled as one of his memories, that “Summer of ’59, built creek road [at least the part along the Chambers farm property]. I worked hard that summer.” Samuel K. Chambers, memories, January 13, 1895, unidentified, undated clipping, (undoubtedly the West Grove Independent) in Breylinger, “History of the Chambers Family.” Along Creek Road, on Chambers property downstream, about halfway to the bridge, a watering basin carved out of a gray outcropping provided fresh running water from a spring uphill for horses and humans travelling Creek Road.
²⁰The “watering stone,” is a basin chiseled out of a gray outcropping on the west side of Creek Road with fresh water supplied via an inch and a quarter wide pipe running down from a spring uphill on Chambers farm. Nearby resident David Gray alerted the present author to the “watering stone.” David Gray, interview with the present author, April 24, 2020, and email June 28. 2020. Gary Stolz, a Naturalist at White Clay Creek State Preserve confirmed it interview with the author, May 31, 2020, as did Eugene “Dick” Robinson in his July 2005 through March 2006 interviews, page 12, cited above. Barbe Ballard Breylinger, whom her grandmother, Mary Chambers Folwell, designated her successor as Folwell family historian credits David M. Chambers with the “watering rock.” Barbe Ballard Breylinger, typescript, “History of the Chambers Family of Delaware,” p. 4, Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, Delaware.
²¹“Newark Items,” Wilmington Daily Commercial newspaper, Aug. 28, 1874, p. 1. I am indebted to Scott Palmer, whose Mill Creek History Blog I greatly admire, and who found this article for me, Scott Palmer to the present author, July 23, 2020. The reporter mistakenly identified “Mr. Chambers” as the owner rather than the builder of the picnic area. The owner of Chambers Farm property at the time was Mary Jane Chambers, his sister-in-law, the widow of David’s brother John W. Chambers.
²²David McCausland Chambers (1820-1904), in McElroy’s Philadelphia Directory, 1851 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Edward C. & John Biddle, 1851), p. 66. His business was at 69 N. 3d St., ibid, 1866, p. 138, then at 235 Market Street. He later moved entirely to Camden at 521 Cooper Street. In addition to being a merchant, Chambers was a liberal Republican urban reformer. The childless Quaker was also was president of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, one of the founders of the New Jersey Reformatory at Rahway, as well as a director of Cooper Hospital and of the Camden Home for Friendless Children. During the Depression of 1893, he helped organize a Society for the Relief and Prevention of Poverty, which created paid public work for numbers of the unemployed. Because of his philanthropy, Camden named after him Chambers High School, which no longer exists, and Chambers Avenue, which is still located downtown next to Cooper Plaza Commons adjacent to Cooper Medical Center. Thompson, What Love Can Do, 90-95, Jeffrey M. Dorwart and Philip English Mackey, Camden County, New Jersey, 1616-1976: A Narrative History (Camden, N.J.: Camden County Cultural and Heritage Commission, 1976), 106, 110-112.
²³"Newark Items,” Wilmington Daily Commercial newspaper, Aug. 28, 1874, p. 1;
²⁴For the quotation and for “Lover’s Retreat,” and “sparking,” see Eugene “Dick” Robinson Interviews, July 2005 through March 2006, pp. 12-13. I am grateful to Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist at Delaware’s White Clay Creek for sending me a summary of the interviews, email January 28, 2021.
²⁵In an unpublished memoir, a woman from nearby Corner Ketch, in the 1920s and 1930s, told about meeting relatives from Kennett Square there at “Lover’s Retreat,” by car. Myrtle Emma’s memoir, chapter entitled “Lover’s Retreat.” Scott Palmer has been posting sections of the memoir on his invaluable Mill Creek Hundred History Blog. I am grateful to him for sharing this excerpt with me even before posting it. Scott Palmer to the present author, July 23, 2020. On the railroad’s closing, “Will Abandon Pomery Train,” The Newark Post, Sept. 26, 1928. The railroad abandoned passenger trains in 1928 and freight trains beginning in 1936. It could not compete with automobiles and trucks.
²⁶Bonnie Franςois Bupp, interview with John Whiteclay Chambers II, May 26, 2021.
²⁷The 1984 ceremony included a flat bed trailer as a stage for dignitaries from the Du Pont Company and London Britain Township. Frank Cornell, interview, Sept. 22, 2020 with John Whiteclay Chambers II. For earlier reported use of the site for picnics, see “Newark Items,” Wilmington Daily Commercial, Aug. 28, 1874; “Public School Picnic,” Newark Delaware Ledger, June 12, 1888; “Newark,” Wilmington News Journal, July 28, 1893; “A Summer Day in the Woods,” Newark Post, July 20, 1910; I am indebted to Scott Palmer for providing these news clippings to me, Scott Palmer to the present author, July 23, 2020. Eugene C. (“Dick”) Robinson said that Mary Chambers Folwell had shown him such photographs of church picnic there from the nineteenth century, a story he told in one of his interviews with Jan Owens, who, in turn, related it to the present author, June 2, 2020.
²⁸David Gray email to the present author, June 28, 2020. In an interview, April 24, 2020, and an email June 17, 2020, David Gray reiterated stories of "Lover's Lane” in the 1950s and 1960s.
³⁰For more details see, John Whiteclay Chambers II, “Restoring the Chambers Farm in the 20th Century,” that was first posted on The Mill Creek Hundred History Blog on May 13, 2021, it and the present article are sections of Chambers, “History of the Chambers Family of Hilltop.”
³¹My cousin, Barbe Ballard Breylinger, a granddaughter of Mary Chambers Folwell, had asked her grandmother that question sometime in the 1940s. Barbe also includes a copy of the farm’s printed stationery clearly headed “Chambers Rocks Farms: Breeders of Jersey Cattle.” “Rocks” is clearly plural. Breylinger,” History of the Chambers Family of Delaware,” unpublished, unpaginated typescript, 2008, Delaware Historical Society, Wilmington, Delaware.
³²Pre-1849 road, but without a name given, is clearly visible in Samuel M. Rea, et al., Map of New Castle County, Delaware from Original Surveys (Philadelphia: Smith and Wistar, 1849). It was still a dirt road in 1922, as opposed at that time to the paved “stone road,” the New London Road to Newark, Seaver A. Ballard, who worked there in the 1920s, letter to John Whiteclay Chambers II, Nov. 4, 1989, who also confirms the farm’s official name: “Chambers Rocks Farm”; “Strickersville Road,” both in in Breylinger, “History of the Chambers Family.” On the new metal bridge in 1928, Thompson Station Bridge (SB216), see
https://deldot.gov/environmental/archaeology/historic_pres/bridges/pdf/br_216.pdf. On “Chambers Rocks Road,” plural: Harold S. Hill, longtime zoning officer at London Britain Township Offices, told Francis (“Frank”) Cornell, in 1957, when Cornell was obtaining permits for building his house on that road. Hill told him that the then Chambers Rock Road, singular, had previously been named “Chambers Rocks Road,” plural. Frank Cornell, later elected to the township Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and 1980s, interviewed by John Whiteclay Chambers II, Sept. 22, 24, Oct. 6, 2021. Chambers Rock Road is currently a London Britain Township Road (T319). Until the mid-1950s, the Delaware Department of Transportation called their end of the road, an extension of Thompson Station Road, while Pennsylvania state and township called the majority of it, Chambers Rocks Road. Joseph (“Joe”) Allmond, who lived then at the intersection with Thompson Station Road, interview with John Whiteclay Chambers, April 22, 2020, and later an email, Aug. 12, 2020, with a confirmation photo of a 1949 road map; Frank Cornell also remembered the separate state names for the same road between Thompson Station Road and New London Road (SR 896), Frank Cornell, interviewed by John Whiteclay Chambers II, Sept. 22, 2020.
³³Breylinger, memo, Aug. 25, 2003, included in Breylinger, “History of the Chambers Family.”
³⁴The local population in the mid-twentieth century, at least, ignored the plural “Chambers Rocks” and called both the farm and the road by the singular “Chambers Rock.” Even Mary Chambers Folwell, or her typist, made the same mistake, referring to “Chamber’s [sic] Rock [singular] Farms,” in her 1959, typescript, “History of the Chambers Family,” p. 40. The singular and plural appeared interchangeably in the local Delaware newspaper, the Newark Post, “New Manager for Farm,” Newark Post, April 30, 1924, p. 3; “Spring Jersey Show Here,” ibid., May 23, 1929, p. 1; “Home Destroyed by Flames Tuesday,” ibid., Feb. 20, 1941, p. 1; “Drobeck Overcomes Erosion at Rock Farm,” ibid., April 3, 1941, p. 2; and “Methodists to Hold Family Picnic Sat.,” June 7, 1951; but most consistently in the singular in the Wilmington News Journal newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, undated sometime untitled clippings from the Wilmington newspapers from Charles Stockman’s Face Book, via Joe Allmond, on local fire stories, about the fires at the Chambers Rock Farm’s livestock barn in the late 1940s or early1950s and another on a fire sometime after 1959, at an 1800s house owned by the Du Pont Company at 970 Chambers Rock Road. Among people who lived in the area at least in the 1950s and 1960s, that the present author interviewed, none had heard it called by the plural official title: Chambers Rocks Farm. All knew it as Chambers Rock Farm, singular. David Gray, Jack Murray, Joe Allmond, and Anne Murray, individually to the author, Aug. 6, 7, 10, 2020. Kathleen Sullivan, a naturalist and interpretive guide at Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park since 2002, reported that she heard it both ways but concluded “most people use just the singular.” Kathleen Sullivan to John Whiteclay Chambers II, Aug. 7, 2020; Gary Stolz, naturalist at Pennsylvania’s White Clay Creek Preserve, reported that he had only heard the farm referred to in the singular, email to the present author, Aug. 10, 2020. Longtime resident Dick Robinson who bought his house on Creek Road from Mary Chambers Folwell in the mid-1950s, also used the singular, “Chambers Rock Farm,” Eugene C. Robinson, Interviews, July 2005 through March 2006, for Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park, sent to the present author by Kathleen Sullivan, naturalist there, January 28, 2021, to whom I am grateful.
³⁵Philip 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 manufacturers, Folwell had become vice president of Zollinger-Harned Co. department store in Allentown. Mary Chambers Folwell sold 207 low lying acres (of the 515 acres she, her father and his brothers had accumulated) to the Du Pont Company which at the time was planning to dam White Clay Creek and create a reservoir to provide water for the Newark area’s anticipated needs. The dam project was later stopped by a preservationist movement, which resulted in the Du Pont lands being donated in 1984 to the states of Delaware and Pennsylvania to preserve. Jan Owens of Newark, Delaware, is writing a history of the late twentieth century events and citizens’ movement that led to the preservation of much of the White Clay Creek River Valley. “Chambers House,” the stone house at 1475 Creek Road, which is today the Nature Center of Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park was built in 1820 or after, by Joseph Chambers, oldest son (1773--?) and an heir of Benjamin Chambers (1746-1819) and his wife, Hannah Black (1741-1832). Benjamin, in turn, was the youngest son of Richard Chambers (1700-1774), born in Yorkshire England, who came to Pennsylvania in 1713 with his parents, John Chambers and Deborah Dobson and his siblings, including his brother, John Chambers, in 1713 and settled in New Castle County. The 1890, two-story, framed “Chambers House” preserved at 196 South College Avenue, Newark, Delaware, is from a different branch of the Chambers family than Joseph Chambers’ 1820 stone “Chambers House Nature Center” at 1475 Creek Road in Delaware’s White Clay Creek State Park.
³⁶Breylinger, “History of the Chambers Family.”
***Jan Owens' forthcoming History of the White Clay Creek, a long researched account of the successful citizens’ movement to preserve this now nationally designated wild and scenic river, and Delaware state park and Pennsylvania state preserve, is in the final stages of publication and is already listed on Amazon.com. Jan Owens was very gracious in sharing information with me as I began my own research in 2020.
No comments:
Post a Comment