Strode's Mill Historic District

Strode's Mill is a crossroads village in East Bradford Township, Chester County, whose core buildings date from 1721 onward. The stone mill, built by John Willis and neighbors on Plum Run, is a first-period mill and one of the oldest surviving in the Brandywine area. Richard Strode's farmhouse, begun about 1772, and the East Bradford Boarding School for Boys, a serpentine stone mansion completed in 1798, show Georgian and late Georgian/early Federal styling. The boarding school operated from 1816 to 1856 under Joseph C. Strode. In the later nineteenth century, the Strode family became known for sausage and scrapple, sold at Philadelphia's Reading Terminal Market from 1893. The village has kept its four-corner layout and much of its early fabric, and it is regarded as a rare survivor among the region's eighteenth-century service villages.