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| What I believe to be a close approximation to the original four Nivin tracts |
property can take. It can go centuries being owned by just a few families, or it can change hands many times. It can start as one big tract and get broken up, or start smaller and get built up. It can be owned by people whose names you know, or by smaller and lesser-known families. In this story, we have pretty much a little bit of everything. This is a farm that has been mentioned in passing a few times before, always with the "I'll have to look more into it later" caveat. Well, it's now later.
The farm in question is often known as Sugar Loaf Hill Farm, although it's unclear when that moniker was attached and by whom. My best guess is sometime in the mid-19th Century, which will be much later in our story (in the next post). That's because the really interesting stuff took place a century or more earlier, and while I don't have every detail nailed down just yet, I think I have a pretty good idea of what happened and when. Our first question though, is where.
This particular property was both built up, and then later broken apart. The tract lies on the north side of Hercules Road, and at its greatest extent, very generally, stretched from about McKennans Church Road on the west to about halfway down Hercules Road to Lancaster Pike. It then extended up and over Lancaster Pike, over to almost Old Wilmington Road, stepped south and west a few times, ending up on McKennans at about McKean High School. At its largest, the farm included about 420 acres, but it didn't start out that size. Quite confusingly, at the point where I had first jumped into the stream (a few sales in the late 1760's/early 1770's) the property was being sold as four separate (but presumably contiguous) parcels -- of 200, 39, 102, and 80 acres. It was unclear whether they had been acquired simultaneously or cobbled together over the years. I still haven't found all the answers, but I do have enough to piece the story together.
