The Rescuing of the Harmon Talley House

The Harmon Talley House

In the last post we took a deep dive into the history of the Harmon Talley House on Mt. Lebanon Road 
in Talleyville, and looked at some of the people who lived there over the past 200 years. In this post I want to bring the story up to the present day, and show you some of what's been going with the house over the past few years. At the time of my original post in 2015, the state of the house was, to put it mildly, poor. It had been all but abandoned for seven or eight years, there was a large hole in the roof, and the interior was in bad shape because of it. I really expected at that point that it would fall down or be torn down sometime in the very near future.

This was all set in motion where we left the house in the last post, when in the late 1960's Woodlawn Trustees decided to sell off most of what had been Tippecanoe Grove Farm. If you recall, Woodlawn was (and still very much is) a trust formed by William P. Bancroft in 1901 to oversee his acquisitions and disposition of land in Wilmington and in Brandywine Hundred. At one point Woodlawn owned over 2000 acres in Brandywine Hundred -- most of the land between Brandywine Creek and Concord Pike, from Sharpley Road up to the PA state line. In a contentious point that still comes up today, Woodlawn Trustees has always had a dual mandate to both preserve land and to occasionally sell off some of the land to help fund the rest of its work.

In the late 60's they decided to sell the old Talley farm, and the neighborhood of Tavistock was born. A lot of about an acre was carved out for the old house, and in 1975 it was finally sold. Woodlawn regularly placed deed restrictions on properties it sold (I've heard stories of residents in Tavistock, even recently, having to go to court to fight some of these), but in this case some of those restrictions probably ended up saving the house. It was resold in 1982, and when we picked up the story in 2015 those owners had allowed it to deteriorate so badly that a developer at first wanted to tear it down, claiming it could not reasonably be restored. At that point, it seems that only the Woodlawn deed restrictions against it prevented the house's demolition, and those plans were rebuffed.

The History of the Harmon (Eli B.) Talley House

The (now, again) beautiful Harmon Talley House

Back in early 2015 I felt compelled to write a post about the Eli B. Talley House (now more correctly referred to as the Harmon Talley House), and about the intrigue surrounding it, involving the then-owners, the prospective buyer/developer, the Historic Review Board, local civic organizations, and area residents. There was quite a bit of frustration and bad blood at the time, and it really seemed (to me, at least) that it was just a matter of time before the beautiful stone house on Mt. Lebanon Road in Talleyville, Brandywine Hundred, was either torn down or allowed to collapse on its own. I'm happy to say now that I was wrong, and though there were some intermediate proposals for it that I'd describe as "Better than nothing", its current condition is absolutely amazing, and far better than I could have hoped for just a few short years ago.

But before we get into the recent and current states of the house (in the next post), I wanted to go back and take a better look at the history of this handsome home. My original post was focused more on what was going on with the house at the time, but luckily for us, since then, the wonderful people at the University of Delaware's Center for Historic Architecture and Design (CHAD) did some great research on the history of the property. They were contracted by the then-owner to produce a Determination of Eligibility report, as he was planning to ask the county for a Historic Zoning Overlay for the property. The following history is drawn primarily from that report, and I am indebted to them for their informative and thorough work. The entire report can be found here.

Since the CHAD report was more interested in the physical state and architecture of the house, the history they included was accurate, but not detailed in parts. Using their framework, I was able to flesh out the story a bit (ok, more than a bit). While the history of the land around it goes back much further, we'll enter the story in 1803 when Harmon Talley (already in the fifth generation of Talleys in Brandywine Hundred) purchased 105 acres from William Wood, which Wood had acquired from the McBride family.