#30 2022 52-Hike Challenge: Glenroy Preserve, Oxford, PA 7 miles
Close to home is a newly opened preserve (2020) that features old tractor paths, a tavern road, saw mill road, and some ruins. Most of the trails are simply repurposed old roads, some quite historic. Chester County is one of the oldest settled regions in Pennsylvania with long indigenous histories followed by rich histories of European settlement and colonial life. Before I did any research on the Glenroy Preserve, however, Amos and I spent the better part of four hours tracing every trail on the property for almost 7 miles. I made lots of notes about the lumps and bumps, ponds and roads, and curious mounds of cut stone and ruins all along the way.
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| Old tavern road |
I saved my research for when I got home after my hike and using the Library of Congress online archived map collection I was able to quickly find Chester County maps from 1840, 1847, and 1860. I noted that almost all the roads (now trails) show up on all the maps, as do the old ruins near the mouth of a feeder creek as once the site of a small textile mill and factory.
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| Dressed stone is there for a reason! |
Using the maps I was able to confirm from my notes the existence of a bridge that crossed the Octoraro based on seeing one dressed stone on the rise along the bank, the original crossing point on the earliest map marked as an important fording. Upstream from where I parked my truck, the maps showed an iron forge, a rolling mill, and Pierces Grist Mill. Downstream the maps showed the location of a smithy and a saw mill. Like many Piedmont creeks, the maps confirmed that the Octoraro encompassed a semi-industrial landscape. It was fun to match my trail notes to the old maps. But the maps also gave me a little shiver as I matched a strange sighting to a set of ruins and maybe my first actual experience of seeing a ghost.
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| Octoraro Creek |
The property comes with quite a pedigree. The owner of this land, Sir John Rupert Hunt Thouron, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in the 1970s, with his wife Esther DuPont Thouron, cared for their thousand acres as only professional horticulturalists could. Throughout the property I saw details of the professional gardener's eye - ornamental landscaping, a field of Cosmos, a hillside of oriental grasses, selected specimen trees planted deliberately. Though current plans call for the culling of non-native trees like Ailanthus and the removal of an oppressive amount of invasive non-native species come in on their own, taking over every woods edge and sunny edge. Oh, the amount of invasive bittersweet was overwhelming.
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| A creek that powered a factory |
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| Ruins on the site of the woolen factory |
Following the old roads here and there, the hiking was easy and the path wide. It was very pleasant hiking and after several hours we began our trek back to the truck. Amos was very excited after seeing some (more) deer cross our path and I was trying to slow him down, quiet him. Coming down a steep section of old road behind an old stone foundation ruins I was trying not to to trip and fall. I stopped Amos for a "timeout" and looked down to where the road came to an old bridge. I saw the figure on the bridge over the small feeder creek that flowed into the Octoraro.
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| Beautiful Hickory! |
The figure was dressed in dark grey overalls, a dirty white shirt, and wore a shabby grey brimmed hat. He appeared to be covered in fiber dust. He stood looking out over the little creek, hands in his pockets. He didn't seem to know I was just twenty yards behind him and closing in being pulled downhill by my very excited coonhound. As I studied him, all grey and still, he didn't seem to me to be a hiker and well, honestly, didn't seem to be of this century. I even entertained the thought "Watch this be a ghost" and gave a little giggle. I looked down at Amos and asked him to not pull so hard on this steep road. I took my eyes off the figure for maybe five seconds to watch my footing then looked up and he was gone! I stepped on to the bridge where he had just been. I looked up and down the tavern road, looked back from where I came, looked up the tractor path along the feeder creek. I even climbed down the bank to look under the bridge. No one was there!
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| Goldenrod Stowaway caterpillar, Cirrophanus triangulifer |
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| Prairie Sunflower, Helianthus petiolaris |
You can imagine what I must have thought as I zeroed in on that 1847 map when I got home, the one that shows Rays Woolen Factory at the bridge and base of the steep hill road. Was the figure a textile worker? I began to research the cotton and woolen mill industry in Chester County and found that it was quite robust with dozens of textile mills operating in the mid-1800s. The now restored Chestertown Woolen Mill is one of the few remaining examples of a woolens factory left standing may be a great place to visit some time to learn more about the textile industry in Chester County. Scanning old pictures of textile mill workers I found a few that looked like the figure I saw on the bridge complete with overalls, brimmed hat, and young, covered in fiber dust.
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| Yikes. |
Another spooky experience was walking through a mature bamboo forest that seemed so weirdly placed between two cornfields on the top of the ridge. Maybe it had been planted to serve as a windbreak or a soil conservation device, but it was old and dark and almost lightless. Beyond the dark tunnel was a mature plantation of spruce trees, not native to our region, but used like bamboo in the 1950s and 1960s to create conservation buffers on eroding land. I could see these types of plant assemblies clearly on Google maps with a satellite view. The bamboo forest was just a few minutes before we came down the steep winding road to see the figure on the bridge.
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| A field of Cosmos |
I'm not saying I believe or I don't believe in ghosts. I've had odd experiences before and have been open-minded about what happened and why. I'm not a big fan of the paranormal at all and really dislike when good landscape history is mixed up with "sightings and frightenings." But my own experience of seeing this young man standing on the bridge just yards from what would have been his workplace at the woolen factory was not scary at all. I didn't know anything about the woolen factory at the time I saw him except that he was there and then he wasn't. When I found the woolen factory on all the maps I had pulled up, I had a sense of relief that the figure fit the landscape so perfectly in place and time.
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| High road and low road converge - this intersection appears on the 1840 map |
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| Road down the Blackburn Branch from the mill pond |
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| Road to Kirks Saw Mill site (1847 map) |
As I researched the history of the textile industry in Chester County a little further, I learned that by the 1830s mechanization and commercial factories and mills had all but eliminated the weaver's craft in South Eastern Pennsylvania. Cottagers who still worked their looms making linens and cloth by hand were almost completely replaced in rural areas by small factory enterprises. Workers were often immigrants or members all of a single family with ties to the textile industry in England, but the importance of a robust rural labor supply was critical to the success of the region's textile manufacturing. I went down a researcher's rabbit hole when I discovered Adrienne Hood's book The Weaver's Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early Pennsylvania (2003) and now am inspired to find out more about how this industry changed and impacted our landscapes.
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| Gneiss showing extreme deformation |
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| Basalt occlusion trapped in Gneiss |
Hood's work answered an important question for me regarding the dispersed nature of the textile mills and factories in the region as compared to New England where textile milling factories were concentrated in complexes of industrial towns. Her research suggests that south eastern Pennsylvania retained its ties to England and its rural textile traditions well into the 1800s, thus patterning itself much like English and Welsh rural cottager transitions to small family-run factories throughout the agricultural landscape. Though just as productive and robust, the Pennsylvania transition to cloth-making at industrial scale was dispersed among the rural countryside located alongside small Piedmont streams. Ray's Woolen Factory was one example of that dispersed industrial pattern, every bit as important to the global textile economy during the early 1800s as those huge factory towns built along the Merrimack River.
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