Twelve years ago, I left behind a life and career in New York City to move full time to our farm in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a new career, and a calmer, "greener" existence. Planting and gardening, animals and wildlife, building and repairing, harvesting and cooking, writing and lecturing, joy and contentment are all integral parts of this wonderful new existence. It has been a revelation to me, and one I would not only like to share with you but urge you towards. I look forward to your comments.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

A BRIEF HISTORY

I have been working on a history of the farm and gardens for the past few months and thought, this month, i would share a bit of it with you. For those of you unfamiliar with Bucks County, we are a place unusually rich in American history, having been settled in the 17th Century by immigrants from Europe even in advance of the arrival of William Penn in 1682. Our little town, Wrightstown, was first incorporated in 1692 and, by 1787, was a flourishing little township of 4 peaceable hamlets, 364 inhabitants, and 58 handsome, stone dwellings.



Ours, situated in a little valley about a mile east of Wrightstown center, was begun by William Warner, one of Wrightstown’s earliest settlers, who purchased the land from William Penn in 1690, but is believed to have immigrated from Blockley in England, where he was a captain in the service of Oliver Cromwell, as early as 1658. William was a member of the first assembly of Pennsylvania, and both the local deputy sheriff and justice of the peace. Although a primitive timber dwelling clearly existed prior to the present stone one, the earliest part of our house, a modest stone cabin: one room up, one down, was completed in 1723.



The second section of the house was built in 1746 by David Daws, the Wrightstown Quaker minister, who purchased 115 acres of William Warner’s tract, including the rudimentary house. This section was approximately twice as big as the earlier one, with a real second floor and attic, wide plank floors, and ammunition drawers under the north and south facing windows. Tragically, David Daws died a brief two years later, thereupon leaving the property to his daughter Elizabeth, who subsequently married John Warner, the boy next door and grandson of William, happily reuniting the parcels and reestablishing the original Warner acreage. By 1770, the recombined property was a substantial holding of 300 acres known locally as “Warnerland”.



In 1793, when the end of the American Revolution had restored peace and prosperity to the region, Isaiah Warner, son of John and Elizabeth, built the third and final section of the house. It is a courtly box of a stone dwelling, joined to the others like the biggest block in a row of three, with impressive cornerstones and a fine paneled parlor stained “original blue” with essence of blueberry. The "Isaiah Warner House" was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004.



It was in the 19th Century that the Warners married into the local Thompson family, who had established one of the first, big grain mills on nearby Pidcock Creek in the hamlet of Wycombe. It was then that the road from house to mill was named “Thompson’s Mill Road”. The amalgamated Warner/Thompson clan ran the mill in Wycombe and farmed their property right into the 20th Century, their cleared acreage being given over to dairy herds and corn.



Around 1860, when the prosperity signaling the end of the Civil War again revitalized the region, two immense dairy barns were constructed on the farm, then outbuildings for storing the milk, carriage and equipment sheds, and a corncrib for the storage of winter sustenance for the herds. At the back of the house, across little Fire Creek, a small holding pond was built to keep the big canisters of milk cool in hot weather, as well as a stone icehouse.



And so the family of farmers and millers and devote Quakers of sound fortune prospered until 1918, when the last of the Warners to inhabit the property was forced to sell the historic homestead. By 1933, as the Great Depression tore through the solvency of the district, the fortunes of "Warnerland" hit rock bottom, and the property, by then so derelict it was known locally as “Skunk Hollow”, was sold at sheriff’s sale for $370.91. The former Warner seat continued its slow, poignant decline into disrepair, until 1980, when, by then reduced to a scant 15 acres, we, guided by what was surely blind providence, chanced upon it.



We began the resuscitation of the farm, the initiation of the gardens,and the acquisition of what now constitutes 100 of "Warnerland's" original 300 acres that same year. And the rest, as they say, is history.

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