As early as 1800, the poor in Chester County had a place in the community, in their own home.
The Chester County Poor House was built with county funds on a large tract on what is now the state police barracks at Embreeville.
There, the comings and goings of “our paupers” were closely monitored by a house steward who lived on the grounds and oversaw its farming operations.
When the paupers were not harvesting crops or making bread, they often received visits from the Directors of the Poor and were written about in the local newspapers.
In fact, the life stories of not only poorhouse residents, but “picturesque local characters” sometimes called “gypsies” and “tramps,” occupied the public’s imagination well into the 1920s.
Until the Depression brought a kind of social democracy to the region, the poor were often looked upon as outsiders, or feeble-minded misfits.
There are old newspaper accounts of “Old Dabbo,” for instance, a former slave who was given the opportunity to attend school but “didn’t learn much.”
Another former slave, “Gango,” found work “bleaching linen” and working for various local farmers.
“Old Black Phil” was described as the “Goliath of wood sawers,” wandering from job to job, living where he could.
Perhaps the most celebrated itinerant was “Indian Hannah,” who died in the poorhouse in 1803 at the age of 100.
Typically described as the “last of her race,” Hannah was said to prefer the free life of her Leni-Lenape ancestors. She roamed the county and earned a living as an herbalist and basketmaker.
Gypsies generally received the most attention, in part because of their exotic attire and habit of traveling in “houses upon wheels,” complete with a “compliment of horses, colts, dogs and chickens,” as one newspaper described them in 1874.
In 1900, a band of “either English or Scotch gypsies” traveled through West Chester on the way south from New England.
Although they were depicted fairly favorably – the writer noted that they had the “best-looking horses” of any gypsy band – most accounts of the period describe a path of destruction whenever gypsies traveled through the county, with cellars raided, orchards stripped bare, and even laundry snatched from wash lines.
Aside from the almshouse, those who were not part of the county’s “roguish wanderers,” such as the working poor, could find a place on local farms, orchards and nurseries.
Two of the largest employees of temporary workers were found in West Chester.
The Hoopes Brotherand Thomas nursery extended from Biddle Street to north of Ashbridge Street and employed “armies” of men to work what was known as the nursery’s “Forty Acres,” full of roses and perennials.
There were also plants and produce to prepare for shipment in the nursery’s “packing sheds” on Maple Avenue.
By 1902, the workers’ housing that had stood nearby for nearly 25 years was deemed an eyesore and torn down. A newspaper reporter noted that the “bunk sheds” which faced a “public highway” were “not a beautiful sight,” especially on Sunday, when it was wash day for the workers.
After new housing sheds were built along Goshen Road, the after-hour activities of the workers, such as their “cooking, washing and mending,” remained out of sight and out of mind for the public, the reporter noted.
In West Chester, some seasonal workers even hoped for a cold snap.
At Uriah H. Painter’s icehouse, for instance, men toiled round the clock packing “ice cakes” cut from two ice ponds on East Gay Street.
They lived in temporary housing and spent their days “cutting, slashing, pushing, hauling, arranging and packing ice,” as one reporter summarized it.
While Painter was known to purchase ice from as far away as Canada, much of the work involved preparing the local ice – keeping it clear of snow with hand-held scrapers and brooms, for instance.
At night, the workers created a scene that put them in a romantic light, their “lanterns flitting about over the crystal surface,” as one writer noted in 1891.

BYLINE: Catherine Quillman, INQUIRER SUBURBAN STAFF

In the 1800s, Chester County must have had a wealth of musical talent.
How else can one explain the hundreds of community bands that were apparently as indispensable as the local fire company?
These bands were found in towns as small as Nantmeal, a village in northern Chester County, where the 18-member marching band included a blind horn player.
The Star Band of Coatesville may have been the largest, growing from 15 members in 1836 to about 50 members throughout its remaining 39 years.
Although the majority of bands raised their own funds – the Nantmeal band once sold 1,400 oysters at a community supper in 1894 – they were hardly informal organizations.
Nearly every band had its own community band house, a bandwagon, an executive committee, and uniforms that any military unit would be proud of. Many band leaders seemed to be spit-and-polish types, such as William Buxton, a railroad engineer who grew up in the Soldiers’ Orphans School in Chester Springs.
When Buxton died in 1920, his obituary noted that he allowed “no oath to be heard in the practice room” during his 30 years directing the West Chester Cornet Band.For the most part, though, news stories about Chester County community bands rarely delved into the lives of band members.
Even the Liberty Cornet Band of West Chester (pictured here), which may have been the only all-black band in the county, was only occasionally described as “colored.” Founded after the Civil War, the Liberty band typically received press coverage because of its Philadelphia parades and its connection to the local political scene.
In addition to following the outdoor concerts, the holiday parades and fund-raising events on every band’s schedule, local newspapers typically followed the seemingly endless task of instrument acquisition and payment.
The 17-member Citizens Cornet Band of Kennett Square, for instance, apparently spent an entire year after its founding in 1881 selling “subscription books” before anyone even had an instrument.
The West Chester Cornet Band, which was known for generations for giving free summer concerts on the courthouse lawn, spent more than $800 in 1883 on new “German silver” instruments. The band members missed their annual Christmas concert in order to get “used to them,” as one reporter noted. They still managed to pay all but $222 of the amount within a few weeks, despite earning an average of only $48 for performances such as their “promenade concert” at Horticulture Hall.
On occasion, the band gave private “serenades” to the newly married, and impromptu street-corner concerts while hauling the bandwagon through town. Still, that didn’t keep them from having certain members of the public rain on their parade.Editorials in 1892, for instance, debated over the band’s request for a concert platform at the courthouse to help them avoid “colds” and “damp feet.”
One writer of a 1911 item headlined “Appreciation Lacking” complained that people often talked during these courthouse concerts. He signed his editorial only as “an ex-musician.”

In the early 1900s, a certain kind of traffic jam was common in many small towns in Chester County.
It happened whenever a troupe of entertainers came to town, bringing along fleets of scenery and even live animals by the train-car load.
These groups had nothing to do with the circus, though. The elaborate stage sets that floated through the streets – “on a daily basis,” as one newspaper reporter in West Chester observed in 1907 – were headed for the local opera house.
Before movie houses, residents came in droves to such places for what was known as “dramatic entertainments.” Yet “opera” rarely meant a night with Caruso.
Judging from the old advertisements and playbills, the performances included everything from poetry readings to “sensational” musical performances, with casts of 20 to 60 people. Patrons demanded, the reporter in 1907 noted, “a different scene for every act,” whereas only “a few years ago, a few sliding scenes . . . answered for every performance.”
At West Chester’s Grand Opera House in 1912, the management “was forced to disappoint” after a traveling act went to Chester “by mistake.” But otherwise, audiences got a seemingly endless dose of melodrama.
The play roster in 1908, for instance, included A Poor Relation, The Poisoner, and The Lost Trail.
When the building, which now houses part of the Chester County Historical Society, was built in 1848, it was known as Horticultural Hall.
In 1880, it was purchased at a sheriff’s sale and converted into a theater by local entrepreneur Uriah Hunt Painter, who enjoyed only brief success.
A reporter noted that Painter, a nationally known Civil War correspondent, had a “nose for the news” but no ability when it came to “securing suitable” dramatic attractions.
Still, minstrel shows, vaudeville acts and one-act plays could be found elsewhere – even in smaller communities such as Parkesburg.
In early postcards, the Parkesburg Opera House resembles a newsstand or small store. But early notices describe it as having a 1,000-seat theater, “two stores,” a “pool room,” and rooms for “secrete societies.”
About the same time that West Chester audiences were enjoying a “romance of the Western Plains,” the Parkesburg Opera House featured “home talent shows” and magic acts.
The latter perhaps did not match the “brace of horses,” including a $5,000 Morgan mare that appeared in the Western romance. But it apparently was entertaining enough, with acts that turned “a Mrs. Holliger’s watch” into a “bunch of carnations,” as one paper reported in 1909.
At the Downingtown Opera House on Brandywine Avenue, the entertainments included basketball games, boxing bouts, and high school graduations.
Built in 1903 in the popular Romanesque Revival style, the building was among the few in the county designed as a opera house. Yet it also featured removable seats.
In Coatesville, notices of a “Poultry Show,” followed by the annual ball and “Mazy” formal dance, appeared in the local papers in 1900.
Such events might seem contradictory, but according to an 1893 description of the Coatesville Opera House, the three-story building was designed in 1870 as both a “town market” and an “amusement hall.”
Although it initially floundered, the “largest” opera house in Chester County was soon attracting “New York- style” productions with its dressing rooms, and a special backstage exit for “star performers,” as early ads proclaimed.
In 1909, those stars included “Kaiser and his performing dogs.”

The esteemed historian Amos Brinton points to the location of Chads’ Ferry (south of Chads’ Ford) where the Hessians crossed the Brandywine on Sept. 11th, 1777.

Discovering the landscape of what has been called the military nadir of the American Revolution has been a pursuit since the early days of battlefield tourism. In the 1930s and 40s, for instance, the celebrated Chadds Ford historian Chris Sanderson presented what he called his “bed sheet” lectures, using a white sheet marked with a black pen to illustrate the locations of not only the fords of 1777 but the now vanished hamlets such as Sconnelltown and Strode’s Mill.

Today, Sanderson’s idiosyncratic collection housed in the Chris Sanderson Museum in Chadds Ford sheds light on the Battle of Brandywine in interesting ways. One treasure on display is a 1787 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, which was the first to include an entry about the Battle of Brandywine. Sanderson also favored objects that reflected the community knowledge of the battle, such as at the amusing sign (painted by the illustrator N.C. Wyeth) that once hung above the door of a local barbershop. The sign read, “This Is the Place Where Washington and Lafayette Had a Very Close Shave.”

Audiences in the 19th century enjoyed slightly more academic “caulk- board” lectures given by Wilmer MacElree, a West Chester author and trial lawyer. In 1912, he traveled to Chadds Ford with a group of fellow historians and looked for significant spots worthy of a historic marker. The group examined the same hilltop behind the John Chads’ House where Washington reportedly stood until cannon balls “began to fall,” before retreating with his officers. Overlooking the village of Chadds Ford, the hilltop offered a view of the surrounding area, MacElree noted, and showed a “variegated landscape [that] extends as far as the eye can reach in all directions.”

Much like Sanderson, MacElree believed the battlefield was best explored on foot, especially along the Brandywine and around Chadds Ford, which had been radically altered by “dam, bridge, and railroad embankments.” It addition, all nine of the so-called Lower Fords of the Brandywine had different names than those in 1777. Even in MacElree’s day, many of the crossing were no longer used – Corner Ford and Richling‘s Ford below Chadds Ford, among them – but he anticipated the public’s reaction to those confusing fords by encouraging his readers to trace the old colonial roads.

In 1777, Gen. Washington placed patrols along the fords where he anticipated a British attack moving from west to east across Brandywine with the main area of defense focused on the Nottingham Road. In reality, there were side paths that split off from the road so that travelers could chose to cross either Chads’ Ford or Chads’ Ferry. MacElree envisioned the paths as established through fares known as Upper Ford Road and Lower Ford Road. The latter road led to Chadds Ferry

MacElree wrote that one could imagine the location of Chads’ Ford since it lay just above a bridge during his lifetime on the Old Nottingham Road (Rt. 1). He described Chadds Ferry as being within six hundred feet of the bridge, but difficult to find since the area had been obliterated by the construction of the Philadelphia & Baltimore Central Railroad in 1854.

Historians now believe that the Lower Ford Road was once part of the colonial-era Starve Gut Road, so named because there were no taverns along it. The road may have roughly followed the current Fairville and Hillendale Roads, west of the village center of Chadds Ford.

In his 1912 book Along the Western Brandywine, MacElree includes an entire chapter on Chads’ Ferry, but unfortunately, he does not explain why such a small settlement came to have both a ford and a ferry. MacElree does describe the Ford in some detail, explaining that “its width is a little less than one hundred and fifty feet” and that in his day, it was difficult to see the crossing due to flooding. In his words, there were “times of freshets” when the “tussocky meadow of a thousand feet” was flooded and the area between the dam and John Chads’ house “is frequently covered with water.”

In colonial times, a bridge-building jury comprised of local residents did not even recommend the ford crossing, on the ferry’s, a “place most convenient and least expensive was about 13 perches below the said ford.” Evidently, John Chads didn’t consider the ford crossing either, even though it was near his first home and a tavern (later known as the Three Compasses) he established in 1736.

When Chads borrowed money from the Provincial Court to build a ferry crossing in 1737, he didn’t even mention the higher crossing but instead specified that the ferry be placed several perches south of “Great Road leading from Chester to Nottingham, on ye land of John Chads.”
Chads Ferry was soon forgotten in the years after Chadds Ford earned a stop on the railroad. Around the same time, MacElree’s book helped to spur local tourism to see the fords, especially the “redoubt [that] directly faced and commanded the passage of Chads’s Ford” as MacElree wrote of Washington’s main position.

Still, the real surge in tourism did not occur until after the construction of a concrete highway (now U.S.1), when nine thousand people visited Washington’s Headquarters alone in 1921. The exact count was thanks to Sanderson, then a local schoolteacher and antiquarian who kept a record of his visitors. A lifelong bachelor, Sanderson lived with his mother in Washington’s former headquarters from 1906 to 1922.

Postcards from this period suggest that visitors were drawn to the house by a simple hand-painted wooden sign nailed to a tree in the front yard. No doubt Sanderson put up the sign: he not only gave free personal tours of the house to anyone who requested one, he developed driving tours of the battlefield. He is believed to have assisted the writer of a 1922 Keystone Motorist article, who swept through the area and wrote of the historical markers recently placed in the area by the Brandywine Valley Farmers’ Club. There were not as many signs as those in Valley Forge or Gettysburg, the writer observed, but a visitor “is able to identify principle points of interests,” a vast improvement from “10 or more years ago.”

Ten years later, another writer for the same magazine, a former clergyman named John T. Faris, became a popular writer of local histories based on his excursions. In one story, he echoed many writers before him when he compared the present to that “autumn day so long ago” and noted that “the [Brandywine] creek, the meadows, the woods, the fields, some of the houses – yes, even the roads, in places – are not so much changed.”
Sanderson’s own efforts to commemorate the Battle of Brandywine were said to have begun in 1910 when he raised funds to place a small bronze marker at the headquarters. Sadly, when Sanderson’s rental agreement came to the end, the house was converted into a tea room – a progression that led to disaster.

As historian W. Barksdale Maynard writes, Sanderson “had reluctantly moved away when, in 1931, news came that the venerable house had burned. What stands today is a reconstruction.” The headquarters reconstruction did not occur until a few years after the Brandywine Battlefield Park was established as a state park in 1949.

Sanderson did not attend the grand opening, and indeed, some of his supporters pointed out that he was never invited nor given credit for initiating the state historic marker program. Despite this discouraging period, the unassuming house has always been a perennial favorite for tourists, as Maynard sums up Washington’s Headquarters. Maynard traces the history of tourism and jokingly suggests that Lafayette was the first tourist “even before the war was over.”

In December of 1780, Lafayette and a group of French friends that included a fellow officer named Marquis de Chastellux rode down from Philadelphia and visited the battlefields at Chadds Ford and Birmingham. In Chastellux’s now classic memoir, Travels in North America, In The Years 1780-1782, he describes Lafayette’s search for the place where he had been wounded, somewhere south of Birmingham Hills.

It was a place where Chastellux observed that day “most of the trees [still] bear the marks of bullets or cannon shots.” The group brought along a 1778 map published in London with the title, Battle of Brandywine in which the Rebels Were Defeated. Described as Drawn on the Spot by a Hessian lieutenant, the map was hand-colored to illustrate the headquarters, deployment, and movements of all three forces: British (red), Hessian (blue) and the Continentals (yellow).

Determined to find the place where Lafayette had been wounded, the group sought out the guidance of a former American officer who was living in a house overlooking Sandy Hollow. Yet “already just three years after the battle,” Maynard writes, “they expressed perplexity and disagreement about what had happened where.”

As for the 1778 map, it may have illustrated with landmarks, but parts of it were so inaccurate, Maynard writes, it “ultimately sowed much confusion about the events of the battle, which historians are still trying to disentangle.”

In the weeks and even months leading up to the Battle of Brandywine, the British sought out information from a network of spies that included local residents who could tell them how to navigate the Brandywine Valley, a region they assumed to be filled with difficult terrain. Many of the names are lost to history, but others are documented as recruits by Joseph Galloway, a former Chester County resident and Philadelphia attorney. Galloway became the notorious assistant to Howe during the Philadelphia Campaign, recommending local residents, for instance, to serve as spies, scouts, or guides. At least three of the guides were Quaker residents from different regions of Chester County.


The Loyalist guide Richard Swanwick owned extensive properties in West Caln and Charlestown Townships, and wrote in a compensation claim to the British that he was approached by Galloway after the Sept. 11th battle “in the name of Sir Wm. Howe who requested [his] services in pointing out the Roads and obtaining Intelligence of the force and situations of the American Army.”

At least two of Galloway’s group assisted the British at the Brandywine: John Jackson, a clockmaker from East Marlborough and Curtis Lewis, a blacksmith in East Caln who owed extensive lands in the Bradfords where the Upper Fords were located.
In Lewis’ compensation claim, he stressed the usual “Knowledge of the Country,” but also wrote of his long employment, acting as a guide from the Head of the Elk and later leading what was termed the flanking party from Kennett Square.

Not much is known of Jackson, except that he may have later escaped to Nova Scotia, but Curtis’ eventual downfall can be traced through the minutes of the Bradford Friends Meeting.
Curtis was not only disowned by the Meeting, but he was also forced into exile after the Continentals assumed control of his extensive West Bradford lands. In 1779, he fled with his family to Long Island and lost his lands a second time for working again with the British. He contracted a disease and died penniless within the year.


Galloway may be the best-known spy, largely because he made such a dramatic turn at the start of the Revolution. A former delegate to the First Continental Congress and a close ally of Benjamin Franklin, Galloway later rejected all attempts at American independence and abandoned both Congress and the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly, where he had served as Speaker of the House.

The spy, Joseph Galloway, from a drawing depicting him
as a young man by Thomas Emmet, 1885

Galloway then became an informal advisor to Howe on the Philadelphia Campaign of 1777, and perhaps did the most damage to the American cause by serving as his guide on the infamous British “Left Hook” or flanking movement through Chester County, Pa., just before the Battle of Brandywine.

Indeed, it was Galloway who was said to have recruited Jackson and Curtis, who lived in Chester County and were apparently familiar with the area’s winding roads as well as the Upper Fords of the Brandywine River. (The British cross two fords above the “Forks of the Brandywine” near present-day West Chester.)

Galloway, who lived in Philadelphia, had an equally firm grasp on the territory of Chester Country. The Hessian officer Ewald was so impressed with Galloway, he pronounced him a “Real geographical chart.”


Ewald led one of the Hessian units on the flanking maneuver and he later reported that he had ordered that they were to move as “slowly as possible, to use all caution in order not [to] fall into an ambuscade [ambush], as the area was traversed by hills, woodlands, marshes, and the steepest defiles.”

For much of the morning of September 11, 1777, Galloway was in the lead, helping Howe’s troops to avoid detection; Ewald would later credit Galloway in this sweeping statement: “He constantly judged so correctly that I always found the enemy there where he presumed him to be.”


Galloway was also considered an authority on the cultural and social pulse of Chester County. He had long reassured Howe that the region matched Philadelphia in its high number of Loyalists and that together with the large number of Quakers, the population would be fairly supportive of the Crown.

The American Sycamore with Gilpin’s house (aka. Lafayette’s headquarters) in the background. You can visit this tree at the Brandywine Battlefield Park in Chadds Ford.

In recent years, historians have tried to dispel the community legend that Gilpin’s House, part of the Brandywine Battlefield State Park in Chadds Ford, Pa. , served as General Lafayette’s headquarters. The Marquis’ friendship nor his ranking did not necessarily give him a special privileges, the theory goes, but more to the point is the lack of real documentation.

Even Lafayette himself did not include any mention of his headquarters in any writings let alone in his 1837 Memoir. The military historian and former park employee, Michael C. Harris, is one of the few to point to Lafayette’s French colleague, the Marquis de Chastellux, whose famous travelogue Travels in America includes a revelatory sentence that Lafayette actually stayed at the Benjamin Ring’s house – not just once, but twice.

The first occasion was in 1777 when the Ring house served as Gen. Washington’s headquarters during the Battle of Brandywine, and the second time was three years after the battle, when Lafayette visited Chadds Ford for an overnight stay with Chastellux and other friends. In Chastellux’s words, Lafayette sought out the “hospitality of a Quaker named Benjamin Ring, at whose house he had lodged with General Washington the night before the battle.”

The community legend about Lafayette’s headquarters at the Gilpin House is said to be based on Lafayette’s famous second visit to America in 1825 when he paid a visit to the owner himself, described as the “aged Gideon” “then on his deathbed.” This written account may have been based on the published writing of Lafayette’s secretary who along with Lafayette’s son, George Washington Lafayette, witnessed the impromptu visit to see the man “under whose roof [Lafayette] had passed the night before the battle.” The fact that it was penned by Lafayette’s secretary added clout to the story, even though it is full of factual errors such as calling Gideon Lafayette’s “ comrade in arms ,” according to Harris.

Harris suspects that the visit was actually a courtesy call to Gilpin, in honor of him being “one of the few still alive nearly half a century after the battle….” Harris says it is more likely that Lafayette stayed with Washington, either in a tent or in Ring’s house.

Perhaps there is little drama in a shared headquarters, nor anything like the story of a wounded Lafayette being carried to Gilpin’s house and treated for his wounds under an American sycamore tree – one that is now the largest and oldest trees in the region. Owned and protected by the Brandywine Battlefield Park, the tree is believed to date to 1650 and has a girth of more than 25 feet.

Despite the fact that the Marquis was wounded miles away at Sandy Hollow, he was said to have refused medical help and famously led the American retreat to Chester. He was later conveyed from there by barge to Philadelphia, resting in a local tavern before being taken by carriage on the long trip to Bethlehem, considered the best place aside from Reading, Pennsylvania, for medical care.

Despite written records that say otherwise, somehow the legend of Lafayette’s tree persists, according to Andrew Outten, the director of the park, who says that the tree was 100 years old when the battle occurred and therefore a landmark at the time.

Unfortunately, the “myth” of the tree takes away from the park’s importance in other ways, such as being a staging ground for a Hessian advance, as well as the site of intense fighting and part of the American retreat.

Another view of the Gilpin House. Photos by Fred Weyman, all rights reserved.

Visit the Gilpin House regardless !

As a house museum, the Gilpin home tells the story of the local families who witnessed the battle firsthand. Surrounded by a battlefield, Gilpin later has among the highest damage claims in the battlefield region: 500 pounds including many livestock but also 4,000 wooden fence rails and 48 bed sheets.

Less than a month after the battle, the Gilpin’s family suffer through a personal tragedy: they lost a child to illness. Gilpin not only claimed damages, he tried to recoup his losses by turning his house into a tavern in the winter of 1778. For that he was disowned from the Concord meeting (though he also reportedly joined the Pennsylvania militia sometime after the Battle of Brandywine). He was also cited for not obtaining the proper licensing and for taking the Oath of Allegiance —a commitment any patriot was glad to take —but it was against the Quaker doctrine to swear to any oath.

Remarkably, Washington’s tent was preserved through the years (as this 1912 photo suggests), but early historians tended to consider only Washington’s so-called “brick & mortar” headquarters.
Gen. Washington may have slept in a tent – now on view at the American Revolution Museum in Philadelphia – and only used the Ring home for meetings with his War Council.

The American Headquarters in Chadds Ford

Thanks to a group of local residents and historians who created the Brandywine Battlefield Park in 1949, visitors now can get insider’s feel for what life was like for residents of the Brandywine Valley in 1777.
The homes of Benjamin Ring and Gideon Gilpin were originally preserved because they served as the respected headquarters of General George Washington and the French Marquis, as Lafayette was often called.

New ways of examining historic sites, based on period documents – and not merely on community legend – has led to the park to place greater emphasis on the Ring and Gilpin families as representative Quakers whose homes reflected the best of 18th-century standards. Today the park keeps the homes furnished in an authentic colonial manner to preserve what park officials call the lifestyle of wealthy, open-minded Friends – each had family members who were so-called Fighting Quakers as well as “a good house, good land, and good-size family.”

Gilpin ran a tavern in his home after the war, perhaps to offset his financial losses. Ring had additional income other than farming. He had inherited the 150-acre farm from his father and later ran a fulling mill and sawmill across the road from his house. The core of the mill is now preserved and serves as the Chadds Ford Township building.

The Ring House

For three days beginning on Sept. 9th, 1777, the Ring House served as Washington’s headquarters. It was a relatively short time, but Washington’s accounting records suggest that the house was crowded with officers and members of the War Council who met and dined in the Ring parlor.
When Benjamin Ring was finally paid in February of 1778, he received 22 pounds that also covered the cost of a special dinner for Washington’s generals the night before the battle. Another account showed that Ring received 37 pound sterling and 10 shillings for Washington’s entire stay and that he was given the funds from “Col. Hamilton by the general’s order.” That is more than $2,000 in today’s currency. Gen. Washington may have slept in a tent at night, but even so the Ring family must have felt displaced. Ring’s wife, Rachel, was pregnant at the time with their eighth child.

After the Battle of Brandywine, Benjamin followed Quaker doctrine and didn’t file a damage claim. Still, historians say that distinct differences are found between Ring’s taxes in 1774 and in 1778 and that plundered items may have included 6 horses, 3 cattle, 6 sheep as well as 10 acres of crops and one servant.

The Ring House is of special interest to military historians since it is associated with both armies.  It was a place where Washington’s Council of War developed their strategy to defend the area fords, among other crucial decisions.

An orchard on the Ring property was also the scene where fighting was described by historian Michael C. Harris as “hard, brutal, and short.” Harris is one of the few to document the orchard as the scene of another “bayonet to bayonet” clash. Harris races some of the men involved to those who fled Proctor’s redoubt above the Chads’ House after it was captured by the British late in the day.


Wayne’s troops (and perhaps the militia under Col. James Chambers) covered their retreat when Proctor’s artilleryman and reserve gunners fled away from the Brandywine and across the fields to the Ring farm.
Harris writes that the “presence of Chamber’s 1st Pennsylvania did little to stem the tide of advancing enemy troops, “ and quotes the American loyalist with the British, James Parker, who mentions the redoubt (the “fort”) as follows:


“Many of them [the Continentals] Ran to an Orchard to the right of the fort, from which they were Drove to a Meadow, where they made a Stand for some time in a ditch.” Parker continues to explain that the British troops continued to cross the Brandywine and routed the Americans from the ditch or “Meadow,” and “all afterwards was a mere Chace [chase], so far as I saw.”

The Queen Rangers that had captured the Proctor’s redoubt used the few guns that were left to attack the Americans below, perhaps Wayne’s defense along the Great Road to Nottingham, “our brave comrades cutting them up in great style,” as one Ranger recalled.

After the battle, the Rangers temporarily encamped on the Ring property. It was near the end-of-the day fighting in Chadds Ford and they no doubt were exhausted. The Rangers were said to have the most losses as any other unit; nearly 20 percent of its troops. The young ensign named Lord Cantelupe, who created a watercolor sketch of the action at Birmingham Hill, wrote that his unit waited the next day when they “marched 2 miles further to Dilworth [Dilworthtown, Pa], & there encamped.”

I

Historians have often found striking similarities between Howe and Washington, especially during the Philadelphia Campaign of 1777 when they shared a gentleman’s regard for one another as commanders in chief.
The two generals both served in the French & Indian War (1754-1763), also known as the Seven Years war, which pitted the colonies under British rule against those of New France. That meant that the young George Washington essentially fought as an equal with Howe, even though the British were known to look down on the Americans.
The next time the two men met, they were on opposite sides of a war and fighting for control in what was known as the Patriot siege of Boston including the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17th, 1777.
Personally, the two men shared common interests despite their vastly different upbringings.

Howe was born into an aristocratic family in Plymouth, England, in 1732 – three years after Washington – but had the kind of wealthy upbringing that the young George might have envied, according to Caroline Tiger, author of General Howe’s Dog. Tiger writes that Washington did not admire anyone’s wealth so much as have a striving for the gentleman’s lifestyle. The young George was only 11 when his father died and he left home and went to work as a surveyor at the age of 16, the same year he embarked on a self-guided course of study in decorum and social manners.
At the time of the Battle of Brandywine, Washington and Howe shared a slew of common interests such as horsemanship, fox hunting, raising hounds, gambling, and attending social functions. They also married relatively late in life and their wives had no children.

Still, it may of their backgrounds serving in the French & Indian War that led them to have similar world views, especially when it came to understanding the terrors of war and a disdain for military bureaucracy. Even Howe’s victories over Washington in the New York and Pennsylvania Campaigns of 1777 did not prevent Howe from being chastised for his lack of follow-through after the British occupation of the colonial capital of Philadelphia famously went nowhere.
After nearly nine months of struggling with inadequate supply lines, bored and restless troops, not to mention the pending arrival of the French Navy on the East Coast, Howe was forced to vacate the city by June of 1778.
That April, Howe’s letter of resignation was finally accepted in London and a new British commander-in-chief was named. Howe had sent the letter a month after his victory in September at the Battle of Brandywine, but his complaint that he had been inadequately supported in the campaigns of 1777 fell on deaf ears. In contrast, Howe’s military success in 1776 prompted the King of England to knight the general as “Sir” William Howe.

In recent years, historians have examined Howe’s true motives and have said that Howe sympathized with what he perceived to be the average everyman, the “humble” colonist and “his demands for equal rights.” As Tiger puts it, “As much as [Howe] believed in the monarchy, he also believed in the rights of the individual.”

The Taylor-Cope Historic District near Marshallton, Chester County

"I have often been impressed with the fact that many of the descendants of Friends....[express pride] that some of their ancestors violated one of the most vital doctrines of their religion by taking up arms in a supposed good cause.”

Gilbert Cope, from an address made on Nov. 20th, 1902.

On September 9th, 1777, Gen. Washington found himself in the midst of a bucolic countryside along the Brandywine, its scattered homes preoccupied with the chores of baking day, with the smoke of fires blending into the gray morning fog.

Most historians agree that the peaceful setting hardly foreshadowed the impending doom and what some call the “fog of war.” The expression points to the expected confusion of any battlefield, but Washington’s “fog” was compounded by numerous challenges rooted in conflicting reports of British troop movements as well as Washington’s lack of local resources.

As many histories relate, matters were made worse by the general’s distrust of the local Quakers. Unlike New England, or even the southern colonies such as Virginia where Patrick Henry presented his now famous “Give me liberty or give me death” address to the House of Burgesses, the Brandywine Valley was not a hotbed of patriotism.

In many ways, local residents wanted to preserve the status quo, especially if they played a part in creating a region known as the “butter belt” and “breadbasket of the colonies".  The Brandywine Valley owed its
success to such natural resources as waterpower, limestone, and iron ore, and to the innovations of the Quaker farmers, who developed pioneering agricultural tools and
farming implements.

A glimpse of what the colonial valley may have looked like may be found today in the Taylor-Cope Historic District (1987),
photographed here.

The hilltop view shows the Abiah Taylor barn on Creek Road. It is the oldest barn of its type in the nation. The nearby Taylor home is the oldest extant brick house in Chester CountyTaylor could afford bricks instead of the usual stone partly because of his successful mill, built in 1719 on the Taylor Run.

Along with Trimble’s Mill and the Marshall mill, both established on the Broad Run, these mills were among the earliest the region and the latter two mills were the longest-running operations in West Bradford Township.

The historic district was named for the Taylors and their neighbors, the Copes, who developed enterprises around the historic Cope’s Bridge, a stone-arch bridge that still spans the Brandywine along the Strasburg (Rt. 162).

Both families were typical of the county's prosperous Quaker farmers, who mystified Gen. Washington for their seemingly contradictory stance. Many of the Quakers here came across as being either indifferent to the British invasion or “more loyal to the King than all the others” as the Hessian captain, Heinrich Von Feilitzsch, described the Quakers.

 

All Photos By Fred Weyman. All Rights Reserved

Battlefield Preservation Plan For the past two years, I have been keeping up with the latest findings of the Brandywine Battlefield Task Force (part of the Chester County Planning Commission) to discover what is essentially Gen. Washington’s footsteps in 1777.      The following is a page from the planning commission’s web page to explain their intent. I have used this research to create a soon-to-be-released history titled “The American Revolution in the Brandywine Valley.” 

Historic Resources

Publications.   Read more about the Task Force here: https://www.chescoplanning.org/HisResources/bbpp.cfm

Brandywine Battlefield Preservation Plan

The plan presents recommendations on how to better preserve the battlefield’s open spaces and historic landscapes. Over 200 historic resources are inventoried within the Brandywine Battlefield including buildings, meetinghouses, fords, and landscapes that were the location of combat and of battle-related events. The plan is presented in two documents below: the main report and a map atlas.

This project was funded through a National Park Service American Battlefield Protection Program grant

A “working” cover for a book slated to be released in spring of 2020 by Schiffer Publishing

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