Marple in the 1850s: Part One – The Landscape
By Sam Pickard
This is Part One of an ongoing series on Marple Township in the 1850s.
Part One focuses on the Landscape of Marple in the 1850s.
This is the first article in “Marple in the 1850s”—a series of posts looking at Marple Township in the 1850s. While these posts will be shorter than normal for the Marple History blog, for the next month or so, a new article in the series will be posted each week or two. If you want more information on the wider world during the 1850s to put things in context, you can check out “What happened in the 1850s?”, or if you want to know why I chose to focus on the 1850s, you can find out here.
For at least the past 60 years, Marple Township has been a heavily built-up suburban area, with large post-war housing developments, shopping centers, drive-through restaurants and banks, and an Interstate Highway. Residents of the township (technically the Broomall CDP) occupy around 4,180 housing units—consisting of single-family houses, twins, and apartments.[1] Around 170 years ago, however, in the 1850s, Marple’s landscape was quite different.
While no photographs, drawings, or paintings of Marple from the 1850s are known to the author, it is still possible to get a sense of what the township’s land and built environment would have been like. The township’s topography is generally the same as it was in the 1850s: relatively flat hilltops with steep drop-offs into the stream-valleys of Darby Creek, Crum Creek, Trout Run, and their tributary streams.[2]
Across this sloping landscape were scattered farms of varying sizes as well as smaller, non-farm residential parcels. While the farms and agriculture will be explored in a subsequent post, it’s worth noting that between 1850 and 1860, the number of houses in Marple grew from only 152 to 161.[3] While some earlier houses (such as the Thomas Massey House or the Van Leer House on Hedgerow Drive) utilized brick in their construction,[4] stone and timber were much more common building materials in township, as seen in the circa 1855 Dickinson House on First Avenue and the recently demolished circa 1847 McCluen House on Sproul Road, respectively.[5]
By 1850 these farms were connected by a road system that would be very familiar to a resident of Marple today.[6] While some of the precise alignments have shifted over time, most major through roads (excepting Highland Avenue, Parkway Avenue, and New Ardmore Avenue) were present in one form or another, and in many cases had been since the early 1700s. The two most important roads were arguably what are now known as Sproul Road and West Chester Pike. Sproul Road dates to early in the colonial era and is formed primarily by segments of what was known as the Great Road of Marple, laid out in 1683, and the Radnor and Chester Road, laid out in 1691.[7]
The West Chester Road, an extension of Philadelphia’s Market Street through Delaware and Chester counties to West Chester, was the other primary road through Marple. Another old road, by the middle of the 1800s, lack of upkeep and increasing traffic had created a muddy (or dusty) road that was not particularly pleasant to travel on. In the late 1840s, the Philadelphia and West Chester Turnpike Road Company had been authorized by the state to improve the portion of the road from 42nd Street in West Philadelphia to Newtown Square and then charge tolls. Between 1850 and 1853, the turnpike company built two eight-foot-wide lanes with hemlock wood planks (hence the road was often called a plank road). Tolls were to be one cent a mile or 1.5 cents a mile for wagons or coaches with three or more horses. One of the toll houses and gates along the road was located in Marple near the border with Newtown Township.[8]
In the 1850s, Marple had no true town center—only a few villages and crossroads hamlets, primarily located along Sproul Road and West Chester Pike. The two most important villages were located in the south and north-central parts of the township. The southern village (which we’ll call Marple P.O.) straddled the township line between Marple and Springfield. Marple P.O. was the home of the Curtis store and post office, Springfield Friends Meeting and burial ground, a blacksmith, the Lamb Tavern and a number of houses. The other, nameless village, which would eventually become known as Broomall, was located at the intersection of West Chester Pike and Sproul Road. Similarly to Marple P.O., it had a store, tavern, (Presbyterian) church with burial ground and a number of houses. It was also home to Marple Public School No. 1.[9]
Be sure to check back next week for “Marple in the 1850s: Part Two” to learn more about the People who lived in Marple Township during this era!
[1] United States Census Bureau, Table DP04: Selected Housing Characteristics. Broomall PA, CDP. ACS 2019 5-Year Estimates Subject Tables, https://data.census.gov.
[2] Joshua W. Ash, Map of Delaware County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Robert P. Smith, 1848); D. J. Lake and S. N. Beers, Map of the Vicinity of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: John E. Gillette, C. K. Stone, 1860).
[3] 1850 U.S. Census, Schedule 1.—Free Inhabitants, Pennsylvania, Delaware County, Marple Township, sheets 201A-211A; 1860 U.S. Census, Schedule 1.—Free Inhabitants, Pennsylvania, Delaware County, Marple Township, pages 93-116.
[4] Marple Township, “OUR HISTORY,” electronic document, https://www.marpletwp.com/DocumentCenter/View/338/Our-History-Marple-Twp?bidId=.
[5] Doug Humes, “Historic Marple Homes: Dickinson House,” Marple Friends & Neighbors Magazine, June 2019, https://issuu.com/bestversionmedia6/docs/2988_marple_friends___neighbors_web_a76eced24b8a35/s/107663; Sam Pickard, “Obituary for a Funeral Home: the McCluen House, ca. 1847-2021,” Marple History, 28 November 2021, https://marplehistory.com/mccluen-house/.
[6] Ash, Map of Delaware County; Lake and Beers, Map of the Vicinity of Philadelphia.
[7] Lucy Simler, Marple Township: The First 100 Years, ed. Bonnie Scott (Marple Township, Pennsylvania: Havertown Printing Co. (printer), 1986), 42-47, 49-50.
[8] Ronald DeGraw, Red Arrow: The First Hundred Years 1848-1948 (Glendale, California: Interurban Press, 1985), 11-16.
[9] Ash, Map of Delaware County; Lake and Beers, Map of the Vicinity of Philadelphia; Marple Township, “OUR HISTORY”; Mike Mathis, Marple and Newtown Townships (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 1998), 9, 19, 21, 51.