Chester Creek Historic District

Glen Mills and the surrounding stretch of Chester Creek form a rural district in Thornbury Township, Delaware County, with houses, mills and forges dating from the eighteenth century onward. Taylor's Sarum Forge, one of the earliest iron works in the province, was operated by John Taylor, a surveyor who worked on William Penn's western lands. Persifor Frazier, his son-in-law, served as a captain in the 4th Battalion of Pennsylvania in the Revolutionary War and was captured at Brandywine, later sitting in the Pennsylvania Assembly from 1781 to 1784. The district's stone and log houses, including the Hemphill House with its Federal-style woodwork, show how buildings were altered as owners' fortunes changed. Its workers' cottages, built about 1830 to 1880 in row and duplex forms, are described as among the best surviving examples of working-class domestic architecture of their period in the region. The mills, once numerous, are largely ruined, but the sites preserve material for archaeological study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century industry.