Okehocking Historic District

Rural district of 18th and early 19th century stone farmhouses, barns and mill sites in Willistown Township, Chester County, about six miles east of West Chester. It is centred on a 500-acre tract granted in 1703 to members of the Okehocking Lenape, who were not long in residence before the land reverted to the Proprietary in the 1720s. Quaker families including the Yarnalls, Smedleys and Garretts then farmed and milled the land, building houses with local stone, a meeting house completed by 1798, and a school. A former inn, the Rising Sun, operated from 1766 until about 1820. In 1913 Dr. Thomas Ashton assembled a 1400-acre estate called Delchester Farm, and other wealthy owners followed in the 1920s. The buildings and open farmland are regarded as a well-preserved record of how the area was settled, farmed and kept open over more than two centuries.