The Old Eagle School, part 3 – Radnor Lyceum

In continuing the story of the Old Eagle School as begun in this column several weeks ago, it is a noteworthy fact that from the time the first small crude building was erected in about the year 1767, it was not only school and church, but pre-eminently “a social center of bucolic life,” to quote from Henry Pleasants’ history of that historic landmark. It became indeed a public meeting place of the neighborhood where militia companies were organized and drilled and where political meetings were held. And on the lighter side of life it was where singing groups and debating clubs met. Still in existence is a quaint invitation of March 1, 1822, for a debate to be held there a few days later. This invitation reads:

“The Eagle Association’s compliments to Miss Eliza Siter and requests the favour of her company at a debate at the Eagle School house on Saturday evening, March 9th.”

This invitation is among the bits of early evidence that the Eagle School was among the pioneers in the “lyceum movement,” which was to become an integral part of the life of the early settlers in this section. Records show that as early as 1935 the Chester County Education Convention organized a County Lyceum with a full roster of officers. As already stated in this column, Radnor Lyceum was organized in 1838 with Hugh Jones Brooke as president. Among the names connected with this Lyceum that still live on in present-day families are those of John Pechin, John Mather, and Adelaide Cornog.

Among these lyceum meetings held in Eagle School is one of 1832 so graphically described by one of the audience that his account is well worth quoting in full. It was given to the Board of Trustees of the old School by the late Joseph Levis Worrall, of Radnor, and recorded in Mr. Pleasants’ history.

“In 1832 we had an exhibition of the telegraph in winter time. Two operators came up to Edward Siter, who kept the Eagle Hotel . . . and asked permission to give the people a free exhibition of the telegraph at the Eagle School. The real object of the exhibition was for the purpose of obtaining an appropriation from the Pennsylvania Legislature through representatives favorable thereto . . . Edward Siter sent word around on horseback to the different stores, blacksmith shops and taverns, and put a notice in the Delaware County paper “Upland Union” of Chester, and in the “Village Record” of Chester County.

“We had a crowd of persons present at the exhibition; the building was jammed, and many could not get in. Dr. Joseph Blackfan and my father, Fred Worrall, were chosen by the people to sit by each telegraph operator, who took their positions at opposite corners of the room. Edward Siter, John Pugh and others stood in the doorway of a board partition . . . as judges to see that no sign was given of what was written, and then a message was sent across, the machine writing by dots and dashes on paper: Dr. Blackfan writing down a message which the operator sent to the man at father’s end, who read it out aloud, and then a message was sent back. The judges were first given the message which Dr. Blackfan wrote down, to see that no fraud was practiced. The message was always read off correctly and the effect on the audience was astonishing. They closely questioned Dr. Blackfan and father to know if there was any collusion. Father and many others thought the exhibition one of supernatural powers. Edward Siter stated that he could not account for it. Others thought that it was the work of the Devil.

“The arrangement for the exhibition had been made with much care. The batteries were concealed in boxes. John Meredith sent men to do all necessary carpenter work without charge; and the school was dismissed at noon, so that they had the full afternoon for making their arrangements. The door was locked until the time of the exhibition.”

Thus did our forebears in this section first learn of the mysteries of telegraph, which was so soon to become one of the country’s greatest means of communication.

From its earliest establishment old Eagle School was placed under the control and management of men designated as “Trustees” or Committeemen, who held a position similar to that of our present-day School Directors. The last formal election of these trustees is said to have taken place in the old building about 1835, at a meeting held there “for the purpose of securing better educational facilities for the neighborhood.”

Many of the names of these trustees have been preserved, not in record form, but in the memories of those who have passed their names down from generation to generation. Among those from Radnor were William Siter (the elder), John Pugh (the elder), Nathaniel Jones, Samuel Cleaver, Robert Kennedy, landlord of “The Unicorn,” and Edward Siter, landlord of “The Eagle.”

Other rural schoolhouses of an early date that have been preserved to the present generation, and are well known to many of us are the Camp School at Valley Forge, restored by the Valley Forge Commission; Diamond Rock School near Howellville and the Octagon Schoolhouse near Newtown Square. Until the Common School System of Pennsylvania came into full operation about 1836 such schools as these afforded the only facilities for the education of children in the rural districts. Many of them were established soon after the arrival of William Penn. Compared to what the schools of today have to offer they were primitive and crude, indeed, yet in their way they served their purpose at a time when nothing else offered itself.

Standard books of these early schools, according to Mr. Pleasants, included “Cornleys Spelling,” “Pike’s Arithmetic,” “The American Tutor” and “Murray’s Introduction to English Reader and Sequel.” Occasionally used by particularly apt scholars were “Gummere’s Surveying,” “Bonnycastles’ Algebra and Measuration” and “Kirkman’s Grammar.” Records show that at the Eagle School the usual tuition was two dollars per quarter, “exclusive of books, slates, ink and goose-quills.”

Old-time school masters usually acquired their positions by “circulating a subscription list around the neighborhood and inducing the various residents to send their children to school at certain rates.” There is some question as to who was the first master, that honor lying between a Brinton Evans and Jacob Sharraden Werkiser, son of that Christian Werkiser who gave the original acre of land on which the first school building was erected. Another of the old masters was James Boyle, descended from Irish gentry, who also taught at Old Glassley School, in what is now part of Devon, and at the Union School, near Great Valley Baptist Church. Still another was Adam Siter, a lame man, whom the pupils “endearingly called ‘Old Step-and-go-fetch-it.” He also taught in the School house at Old St. David’s Church. These old-time school-masters had no supervision from anyone except possibly from “the committeemen,” though there is not much evidence even of this. Among the relics of the Old Eagle School are some of the primitive instruments by which a rudimentary education was literally “driven into its early pupils.

(To be continued)

The Old Eagle School, part 2

In continuing the story of Old Eagle School in Strafford as begun in last week’s column, it is interesting to read what Sidney George Fisher has to say about the early settlement of Pennsylvania in his book, “The Making of Pennsylvania”. “Most of the English Colonies in America”, he writes, “were founded by people of pure Anlgo-Saxon stock, and each colony had usually a religion of its own, with comparatively little inter-mixture of other faiths . . . But Pennsylvania was altogether different, and no other colony had such a mixture of languages, nationalities and religions. Dutch, Swedes, English, Germans, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Quakers, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, Dunkers, and Moravians, all had a share in creating it”.

Of these settlers, the Germans were decidedly the most numerous. Two divisions among them stand out prominently, the Sects or Pietists, and the Church people. The first included the Amish, the Mennonites, Shakers, Mileese, Schwenkfelders and many others. The Church people were divided between the Reformed and the Lutheran, the latter of especial local interest, since it is of them that the settlement in Tredyffrin seems to have been mainly composed. It was Lutherans who founded the first small church on the site of the present Old Eagle School, and, according to Fisher, all these Lutherans had many affiliations with the Episcopalians who at that time “looked upon them as likely to become a church in communion with themselves if not their actual converts.”

The original German pioneers were immigrant peasants, the first of that class to land in America, and very different from the English Yeomanry that settled Virginia, New England and most of the other Colonies. Many of them were very rough in manner and dress, speaking “an unintelligible dialect”. Nevertheless they took up their work of settlement in a new land in a way deserving of admiration. They became farmers, taking good care of their cattle and of their property. According to the historian, Fisher, they were “good judges of land, always selecting the best and were very fond of the limestone district”. And this was evidently one of the attractions in Tredyffrin Township.

These German settlers were not only a hard-working lot, but they were thrifty and frugal as well. When land had to be cleared, they cut down each individual tree and preserved each stick of it. When other colonists built houses with huge fireplaces at each end they used stoves for heating, stoves being of distinctly German origin, as explained in last week’s column. Fisher writes that this use of stoves “is said to have given their houses an even temperature, which enabled the women to work at various useful occupations in the long winter evenings which were passed by the wives and daughters of the other settlers in idleness, with benumbed fingers, shifting places around their romantic and wasteful fires.”

According to an article published in 1888 by Julius Sachse, to whose book, “The Wayside Inns on the Lancaster Roadside”, this column was indebted for the material for the series on the Old Spread Eagle Inn, the settlement of Germans in the present Strafford section dates back to about the middle of the eighteenth century. They were part of the group who, “with a few Swiss families, established themselves between the ‘Blue Bale’ (now ‘King of Prussia’) Inn, of Upper Merion, and ‘The Unicorn’ tavern of Radnor along the road, skirting the southern slope of the Valley Hills.

The first authentic evidence of the existence of the German colony in Tredyffrin Township is found in the deed books of Chester County, which, according to Henry Pleasants’ “History of the Old Eagle School”, indicate the purchase by Jacob Sharraden . . . from Sampson Davis and wife on March 16, 1765, of 150 acres of land in Tredyffrin, lying immediately north of the present Strafford station, Pennsylvania Railroad. This tract is part of an original purchase by Richard Hunt of Brome Yard, Hereford County, Wales, Chirugeon, from William Penn, dated March 1 and 2, 34th Charles II (1683) of five hundred acres described as in the Great Valley in said County of Chester, being bounded on the S. S. E. side with the late lands of Hugh Samuel, which would seem to indicate its extension from the Valley Hills into Radnor Township.

“The deed to Jacob Sharraden for this purchase marks the transition from the Welsh to the German settlement of the neighborhood, it is followed in March 1767, by a deed from Jacob Sharraden to his son-in-law, Christian Werkister . . . of the same premise. As these two men are undoubtedly the most prominent of the German pioneers connected with the establishment of the Old Eagle School, it is desirable here briefly to record what is known of them.”

Mr. Pleasants then goes on to say that neither of these names has been found in any of the immigrant lists. Jacob Sharraden having located in Tredyffrin in 1765, moved in about 1771 to Vincent Township where he died in about 1774. His will indicates that the testator was a religious German of some education and property. Tax lists of Tredyffrin show him to have been the proprietor of a grist mill and owner of 190 acres of land.

Christian Werkiser seems to have married Jacob Sharraden’s daughter, Margaretta. From 1776 to 1785 when he died, he apparently owned a considerable amount of real estate in Tredyffrin. It seems highly probably that he was buried in Eagle School graveyard, although no record of his burial exists on its records. However, his wife’s name is on these records.

Within a few years of the time of his purchase of a large tract of land, Christian Werkiser seems to have been disposed of it in smaller lots to Michael Walts, Peter Stidler and Jacob Huzzard. Meanwhile, from Pennsylvania Archives came an important bit of information to the effect that “when Christian Werkiser passed on the tax lists of Tredyffrin, in 1768, from a humble ‘Freeman’ . . . to the dignity of ‘Owner’ he is taxed not with 150 acres, but with only 149 acres. This discrepancy is the warrant for the belief that between 1765 and 1767 there was established by Jacob Sharraden (then the owner of the land) what seems a distinctive feature of German Protestant Settlements–a place for church and school purposes; and that he was the donor, at least of the ground, on which it was located”.

This is not the sole evidence that this early German settler gave the plot of ground on which the present historical Old Eagle School stands. Statements to that effect were given by early residents of both Tredyffrin and Willistown Townships. This rather definitely affirms the date of 1767 as the year when the first small building for church and school purposes was erected on this plot of ground just north of the present Strafford Station.

(To be continued)

The Old Eagle School, part 1 – Evening Bulletin, Martha Wentworth Suffren

“Still sits the school house by the road, a ragged beggar sunning. Not ‘ragged’ any longer. The trustees see to that. They keep the grass cut, remove a tree if one falls. But – no prayer of faith wafts upward to the blue, no childish feet scamper or scuffle through the deep doorway, even as once from Sunday School. Houses have sprung up thickly around the old building, and children there are in plenty. ‘For educational and religious purposes and for the repose of the dead.’ So runs the ancient devise, as interpreted and re-established by the court.”

So Martha Wentworth Suffren, born in Strafford in 1858, and still a resident of that historic community, concluded an article written some years ago for the “Evening Bulletin” concerning the Old Eagle School. One of the most interesting historical landmarks of rural Pennsylvania, this building stands up the hill north of Strafford Station on Old Eagle School road, which runs from Lancaster Pike crossing the tracks of the Pennsylvania Station by an underpass. The school is, according to Mrs. Suffren’s delightful account, “a quaint, almost forgotten relic of early Colonial days, with tightly shuttered windows and tightly bolted door. With the adjacent graveyard, that is a part of the demesne, where the great trees spring as often from the graves themselves as from the ground between, it makes a distinct – and pathetic – appeal to the passerby.”

Among these graves are those of many Revolutionary soldiers. Another link with that period of American history was proximity of the old school to the last of the “sentinel trees” from which during the encampment at Valley Forge direct communication was maintained with the American Army. This tree, a great chestnut over six feet in diameter, and about seventy-five feet high, was taken down when Sigmund’s Drug Store was built at the intersection of Lancaster Pike and Old Eagle School road.

The original Old Eagle School was probably built in the year 1788, as indicated by a stone set in the south gable. It was undoubtedly intended not only for a school, but for a German Protestant Church, erected by some of the early settlers of Tredyffrin and Radnor Townships who followed the original settlers who were Welshmen. The second group of settlers consisted mainly of Germans with some Swiss and even a few of the unfortunate Acadians driven from Nova Scotia. Following a custom of the home land, these Germans probably built a church before they had even completed their homes.

According to Mrs. Suffren, the original structure was only half the size of the present 33’x19′ now standing. The door, now at the south end, was then in the middle of the west side and the line of the added masonry can be plainly seen. The house as enlarged “took the place of an even older log building, used as church and school, which stood a few feet to the northward. Local tradition has it that the two structures stood side by side until 1805, when the first one was pulled down and the huge logs were used in another building now standing.”

A quaint picture in Henry Pleasants’ “History of the Old Eagle School” shows the small building as it looked in 1788. This picture, the author explains, “has been carefully prepared to conform as far as possible to the most authentic traditions of its appearance.”

Built of stone and one story in height, it had the door of which Mrs. Suffren speaks set between two westward facing windows. The window to the right was a large one, while that to the left was a narrow one. These, with two windows on the northeast side and two on the southeast side, lighted the interior. The door was a double one. Inside there were benches arranged in double rows around the side of the building, making a hollow square pen by the fireplace. Here stood the school master’s desk. At evening meetings held for community purposes, no provision was made for lighting the building except by candle or perhaps an occasional lamp. These, in accordance with the custom of the times, were brought to the building by the attendants and placed in rude wooden racks hung on the sides of the room.

Heating of the building was accomplished at first by an open wood fire, later by a ten plate stove. In this connection it is interesting to note that stoves of this type were distinctly of German origin. There were five, six and ten plate stoves according to the number of cast-iron plates composing the stoves. Five plate stoves were cast at all the furnaces in Pennsylvania from 1741 to 1760. Later these were superseded by the six-plate stove, and about 1765 ten plate stoves were put into use. But even with one of the latter. Mr. Pleasants comments that “the most zealous advocate of fresh air could hardly have complained of the ventilation of the building.”

Inside walls were entirely without plaster; window sashes “slid sidewise on the inside, as is yet often done in old barns, leaving the window ledge outside of the building. There were no shutters to these windows. The front door was secured by a long wooden bolt, slipped into place by a crooked piece of iron, passed through a hole.”

This description of the original school house of 1788 was based, not on hearsay, but on the actual description of it as given by several persons who were daily attendants there not many years later. It cannot fail to be of interest and value, Mr. Pleasants feels, “to the present favored recipients of the glorious school privileges of Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties in this twentieth century.”

(To be continued)

The old Eagle railroad station – PRR

During the past weeks the historic part of our present neighboring suburb of Strafford has been recreated in many of its picturesque aspects for our readers, through descriptions of the old Spread Eagle Inn and the settlement of Siterville, which grew up around it. Much of the historic interest and importance of our locality centers around this old settlement, the name of which came from early owners of the Inn, the Siter family, whose descendants later became large landowners in Radnor township.

As the Pennsylvania Railroad increased in importance, travel along the old highway gradually decreased and the importance of even the finest of the old wayside inns, such as the Spread Eagle, diminished until many of them fell into disuse.

The first station of the Railroad to be located in the general vicinity of old Siterville was known as Eagle Station, which in its original form is remembered by only a few of the oldest residents of Strafford. Among them is Martha Wentworth Suffren, to whom the writer is indebted for her information on Eagle station which, as explained in last week’s column, took its present name of Strafford from the family estate of Mrs. Suffren’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Langdon Wentworth.

The old station stood near a grade crossing about one-third of a mile west of the site of the present Strafford station, at a point where the old Lancaster road crossed the two-track line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The building Mrs. Suffren describes as a substantial one, built of brick and two stories in height, the lower floor divided into two rooms. The one on the West side served as the passenger waiting room and was heated by a coal stove. The Eastern room housed the express office, the telegraph office and the “Spread Eagle” Post Office, all presided over most efficiently by Miss Annie Bloomer.

A few feet to the west stood a large stone house built in 1762, where for many years Mrs. Miflin Lewis, her daughter, Louise, and another daughter, Mrs. Rush, ran a very successful boarding house. At present this is the home of the Rosato family. At one time an uncovered bridge extended from the second floor of the boarding house to the second floor of the station building, showing that the upper floor of the station was used as an extension to the boarding house.

A few may still remember the Lewis boarding house, where many prominent Philadelphia families summered in the days, now long past, when it was noted for its abundant and delicious food. Before the introduction of the Springfield water system, all the water for use throughout the large house came from a pump that stood in the yard between the station and the boarding house. This water was pumped and carried by a squat and elderly colored man known as “Old Charlie”. Near the pump stood a Paulownia tree which cast its blue flowers over the ground in the late Summer. The Spread Eagle Post office took its name form the Old Inn which was about a third of a mile east of Eagle Station.

In the late 1860’s and early 1870’s the Pennsylvania Railroad had many plans for local improvements in the system, most of which were carried out. In 1871 they straightened the line of the road and at about the same period elevated the road bed for several miles, so as to lessen “the tug of the upgrade that the engines had to make to reach a height of 540 feet at Paoli.”

The four-tracked road replacing the two-tracked one as far as Devon was finished in 1886. This meant doing away with all grade crossings, including the one at Old Eagle Station. Since it was impossible to tunnel under the railroad there, due to the steep upgrade, ground to the East was bought from Mr. Wentworth. This allowed for the necessary tunnelling. After World War I, the grade of the Old Lancaster road, west of the former grade crossing, was lowered three feet as part of a WPA project.

Strafford Station in its present form is a relic of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition held in 1876, where it was originally known as the Japanese Building. Built by Japanese workmen, it was put together with wooden pegs instead of iron nails. When the Pennsylvania Railroad first bought it at the close of the Centennial, they placed it at Wayne. However, in 1887 it was moved westward to Eagle, after the Drexel and Childs real estate development made a larger station at Wayne imperative. Soon thereafter the name of Eagle was changed to Strafford.

Mrs. Suffren also tells an interesting tale of the naming of Daylesford Staiton, which centers around one Warren Hastings, an Englishman born in 1732, who 18 years later went to India, where he took employment in the famous East India Company. In recognition of his efficiency he was appointed Governor General of British India in 1774. His rule, while severe, was a just one, which however, brought impeachment proceedings against him by Edmund Burke.

He returned to England, where his trial dragged out until 1795, when he was cleared of all accusations. however, he had spent all his fortune in his defense and in consequence was penniless. With an annuity for life from the East India Company, in addition to a large load, he bought an English estate which he named “Daylesford”. One of his interested friends in the United States was Richard Graham, who had bought a large tract of ground near the present station of Daylesford. When the railroad sought a name for its new station Mr. Graham suggested Daylesford, in honor of his friend. And by that name it is known today.

[Ed. Note: More recent research has refuted the claims that Strafford train station originated at the Centennial. Confirmable documentation shows that the station was built first in Wayne in 1873, and was moved to Eagle (now Strafford) ten years later.]

Strafford’s Wentworth family & mansion – Martha Wentworth Suffren

195069

Probably no one is better qualified to discuss Strafford of an earlier day than the delightful little gray haired lady now almost ninety-two years old, with whom the writer had the pleasure of talking one afternoon last week. As the train outside beat against the window panes in an almost torrential downpour we sat in her quiet living room as Martha Wentworth Suffren told of a childhood spent in the old Wentworth mansion still standing on the hill on the right of Homestead road as one turns to the left from Old Eagle School road.

Built in 1856 by the White family of Philadelphia, this spacious home, with its ceilings constructed 13 1/2 feet high for coolness and ventilation, was bought in 1857 by Mrs. Suffren’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Langdon Wentworth, who were living at the time in an old inn in Paoli, kept by one John Evans. Since the Whites could not, in the end, finance the large home which they had undertaken to build, it was sold to Mr. Wentworth under “mechanics liens.” The latter, in looking for a home for his family, was touring the country roads in this vicinity when the large sign advertising the place for sale attracted his attention.

Here he and Mrs. Wentworth raised their three daughters. In addition to Mrs. Suffren, the daughters are Mrs. Foote, now residing in Garden City, New York, and Mrs. Charles Ruschenberger, who died a few years ago. The latter was a charter member of the Saturday Club and prominent for many years as a member of other community groups. The Wentworth place, with its spacious home surrounded by its 130 acres, gave its name to Strafford Station, formerly called Eagle Station. Although a little reluctant to give his consent to the use of the name, Mr. Wentworth finally did so since the Pennsylvania Railroad was anxious for a word of two syllables which could be clearly called out by conductors!

Martha Wentworth Suffren recalls a quiet childhood when “the seasons were her clock.” There was strawberry time, raspberry time, peach time, apple time, chestnut time. The latter she remembers especially because it was then that “the children had to ge up early to beat the turkeys.” As the latter started from the barn they described a complete circle of these trees that brought them back to the barn again at sundown. As the bushes and trees blossomed and fruited, the small girl picked the ripened fruit as she made her quiet rounds of her father’s farm. In winter she attended a school frun by Miss Anna Markley and Miss Anna Matlack. The school moved from time to time to various locations “which made it exciting,” according to Mrs. Suffren! She finished her education by extensive reading, of which she was naturally fond.

In 1880, Martha Wentworth marries Charles C. Suffren and moved away from Strafford, not to return until 1920, when she occupied the home on Homestead road which she and her husband had built in 1909. Here she has lived ever since, just a short distance from the house in which she was born in 1858. It is now the home of E. Brooke Matlack.

Of the old Spread Eagle Inn, of which we have written recently in this column, Mrs. Suffren recalls that the last owner before Mr. George W. Childs was a Mr. Crumley. When it was occupied as an Indian School as described in last week’s column, this school was run by mary McHenry Coxe, wife of Belangee Coxe. Its purpose was to teach good housekeeping methods which Indian girls might impart to other members of their tribes upon their return home. Before the old Inn was destroyed for stone for the new houses and roads that Mr. Childs was building in Wayne in the late eighties and early nineties, it was occupied by workmen from the Wayne Estate building operation.

The present Spread Eagle Mansion, which takes its name from the old Inn, was built some years before the destruction of the latter. It has had many occupants, of whom the writer hopes to learn more and to tell about in this column. Mrs. Suffren remembers particularly the John B. Thayers, who bought the place in about the middle sixties. There were six children in the family, among them John B. Thayer, Jr., a vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad who lost his life in the sinking of the White Star liner “Titanic,” at that time the largest ship afloat, when it went down in 1912 after a collision with an iceberg.

The small white house to the West of the Spread Eagle Mansion which is now occupied as a Beauty Salon was once a toll house, Mrs. Suffren tells us. A that time a room that just touched the Lancaster Pike was the vantage point from which tolls of three cents per vehicle was collected by the woman in charge as she lifted the long bar that extended across the road in order to let such vehicles pass – a procedure rather difficult to imagine in this era of the fast moving motor vehicles.

An interesting correction on the story of the big oak still standing in Strafford to the north of Lancaster Pike and described in a recent column as a “lookout tree” has come to me from L. E. Davis, of Weadley road, in Strafford. This lookout tree, according to Mr. Davis, was a giant chestnut over six feet in diameter and about seventy-five feet high. This “Signal Tree,” of which Mr. Davis still has a piece, was taken down when Sigmund’s drug store at the intersection of Lincoln Highway and Old Eagle School road was built. The next signal tree was just at the top of the hill north of the Doyle Nurseries. The interesting story of these historical trees was told to Mr. Davis by his grandfather, who died in 1906 at the age of 88. The latter’s son, still living at the age of 85, can also remember these trees.

When the big chestnut on the Pike was taken down to make room for the building of the drug store, it was rescued from burning by Mr. Barr, of Phoenixville, who still has much of it stored in his barn. Out of parts of it he made boot jacks which were sent to the museums of a number of large American colleges.

(The original “Ship Tavern” near Downingtown which is picture in this week’s column is the one described in a recent column as the predecessor of an Inn of the same name, now standing on the highway a mile east of Exton. A group of American soldiers put the “Patriot’s curse” on this original Inn by shooting thirteen holes through the sign in front of the Inn. The curse was apparently potent, as the Inn soon went out of business. The old sign now swings in front of the second Ship Inn. This picture has been used as aprt of a series of places of historical interest. Major Frank Ankenbrand, of Valley Forge Military Academy, has been instrumental in obtaining the picture for use in this column.)

(To be continued)