The Intertwined Histories of the Milltown Road Farms -- Part 2, The McKee (Grendon Farms) Farm

McKee-Johnston-Stephenson Farm - 1952,
with modern streets overlaid

In the last post, we traced the history of the southern portion of the old Ball farmstead, through the ownership of Benjamin and William Sanders, to Robert McFarlin, to Robert Stuart, then to William and Elizabeth Murray, to Ellison Putney, and then finally to the Malmgrens. Now we move to the northern farm, which would eventually become Grendon Farms, and which was originally inquired about. First, we circle back to the time soon after Benjamin Sanders' death in 1860. I've frustratingly not been able to find this particular deed, but sometime between 1861 and 1868, the 78 acre farm (which makes sense -- that's what was left of his original approximately 150 acres after the sale of the southern 72 to son William) was purchased by Andrew McKee, who would have been in his early to mid 50's at the time.

Although a new landowner in MCH, McKee was no stranger to the area, nor was his family new to landowning. He was born and raised in Brandywine Hundred, on his father's farm just north of Wilmington, along the Concord Turnpike. The incline going up from I-95 to Fairfax is to this day known as McKee's Hill, as the family had been there since the earliest days of English occupation. Our Andrew McKee (not his uncle Andrew who the owned the Brandywine Hundred farm at the time) had moved to MCH sometime in the 1840's and leased the farm along Limestone Road directly north of Stanton (later the Satterthwaite farm).

The Intertwined Histories of the Milltown Road Farms -- Part 1, The McFarlin (Heritage Park) Farm

The Sanders-McFarlin House, aka
The Jesus House (since 1975)

It seems to be a recent trend here that I start researching a property that appears to have a relatively straightforward history, but which turns out to be anything but. This has happened again, but this time with the added complication that there are two farms with intertwined histories. It would be incomplete to tell one story without the other, since they started out together and were more or less reunited by a mid-20th Century developer. In this post we'll get a bit of their shared history, and then trace the story of the southern of the two farms (but not the one originally inquired about).

The trip down this particular rabbit hole began with a simple question from a longtime resident of the neighborhood of Grendon Farms (thanks, Tim!), asking about its history. The confusing aspect of all this began right at the beginning, in even defining where Grendon Farms is. For the most part, Grendon Farms is understood to be the small community on the east side of Milltown Road, just down the road from The John Dickinson School and across from Heritage Park. However, those houses across the road are not actually all Heritage Park. From the school down to the Jesus House there are four different developments -- Montclare, Grendon Farms, Heritage Park, and the Village of Lindell -- all built at slightly different dates on different properties. This was the first thing I needed to understand, because it only got worse from there.

The first of the these neighborhoods was Grendon Farms, begun in 1958 on the property previously owned by Joseph Gheen Stephenson. In 1950, Stephenson bought a farm of just under 90 acres, on both sides of Milltown Road, from Samuel and Cornelia Johnston. (We'll weave our way through the centuries to arrive back at that point, in the next post.) However, not long after Grendon Farms began construction, developer Frank Robino purchased the neighboring farm and the burgeoning Grendon Farms, renaming the whole thing Heritage Park in Grendon Farms. So although at the light at Milltown Road and Grendon Drive the signs say Grendon Farms on one side and Heritage Park on the other, technically all the roads around Grendon Drive on both sides are Grendon Farms (at least according to the county's Parcel View site). This includes Gheen Road and Stephenson Drive, in what most would call Heritage Park.