Delaware County

Rose Valley, PA · est. 1947

Long before roads crossed this part of Pennsylvania, an Indian trading path ran west from the Delaware to the country of the Susquehannock — called Minquas by the Dutch and Swedes — and forded Ridley Creek near this spot. Along it moved one of the most valuable commodities of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world: beaver pelts, carried east by the thousands each year to the small Dutch and Swedish trading posts on the Delaware. This single artery tied the fur-rich interior to a global market hungry for felt hats, and helped decide which European power would prosper on the river.

Springfield Township, PA · est. 1991

John Edgar Thomson was born on this Delaware County ground in 1808 and rose to become the guiding engineering mind of the Pennsylvania Railroad, serving as its first chief engineer and later its long-tenured president. He drove construction of the main line linking Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, threading rails across the Allegheny ridges, and pushed the system's reach all the way to the Mississippi. Under his direction the PRR grew into one of the mightiest corporations in the nineteenth-century world.

Nether Providence Township, PA · est. 1955

Built in 1809-10 by Thomas Leiper and surveyed by John Thomson, the Leiper Railway ran about three-quarters of a mile to haul stone from quarries on Crum Creek down to a landing on Ridley Creek. It is remembered as the first railway in Pennsylvania and the first in America to be laid out by survey. Horses drew the loaded cars along its wooden rails decades before the steam locomotive age.

Chester, PA · est. 1954

In the late summer of 1781, the combined French and Continental armies were racing south for the decisive campaign that would end the Revolutionary War. After a grand review before Congress in Philadelphia, the allied columns marched down the old King's Highway toward Wilmington, pausing to camp here at Chester on September 5. Within weeks these same troops would help trap Cornwallis at Yorktown.