Birmingham Township.

nephew of Elizabeth Chads, who was then a widower, had come to reside with his aunt, and superintend the farm. On the morning of the battle, Washington and a few officers rode to the field just above Chads' house, and were busy with their field-glasses, when Amos House and several others, out of sheer curiosity, approached the group of officers. The British artillery from the opposite bank fired several cannon-balls into the field near by, whereupon Gen. Washington remarked to the unbidden company, "Gentlemen, you perceive that we are attracting the notice of the enemy; I think you had better retire." A hint which was promptly taken.¹ Amos House, a descendant of this Amos House, still a resident of Chad's Ford, at the American Centennial, in 1876, had the control of the dairy established by the Dairymen's Association on those grounds, which will be recalled by all who visited the Exhibition.

In 1707, Samuel Painter, a son of Painter or Pariour (for the name is sometimes spelled in that way), became a resident of Birmingham, having purchased something over five hundred acres of contiguous land from several parties in the neighborhood of the present Painter's Cross-roads. He was a tailor by trade, and appears to have thriven in his occupation, for at the time of his death he was the owner of more than a thousand acres in Birmingham, lying nearly equally divided between the present Delaware and Chester Counties. This large estate was not contiguous, that in Chester County being widely separated from his possessions in Delaware County.

In 1688, as heretofore mentioned, it was reported that the Indians on a certain day had determined to massacre the whites, and, as rumor asserted that five hundred warriors of the savages had assembled at an Indian town on the Brandywine, "and that they having a lame King, had carried him away with all their women and children," this alarming intelligence was hastily borne to Philadelphia, reaching there while the Provincial Council was in session. A member of that body, a Friend, voluntarily proposed to go to the place with five other persons, unarmed, and the offer being accepted, they rode to the Indian town on the Brandywine, where, instead of meeting savages in war-paint, they found the old chief "quietly lying with his lame foot along on the ground, and his head at ease on a kind of pillow, the women at work in the field, and the children playing together."² The delegation was assured that the rumor was false, and the woman who had raised the report ought to be burned to death. The site of the Indian town was in the neck of land above the present Smith's bridge, on which afterwards the iron-works of Twaddle were erected, known in more recent times as the old paper-mill.

On June 24, 1729, the Indian chief Checochinican addressed a letter to the Governor and Council, alleging that when they sold their interest in the lands watered by the Brandywine to Penn, he had granted them "a wrighting for the creek of Brandywine up to the Head thereof, which said wrighting, by some Accident, was Lost with all land a mile wide of ye Creek on each side, which afterwards we Disposed of so far up as to a Certain known rock in ye said creek."³ As this disputed title does not touch any portion of the land in Delaware County, but relates to that located in Newlin township, in the present county of Chester, extended consideration of the topic does not come within the scope of this work. The Indians, however, so long as any of them remained, insisted that a strip of land a mile wide on both sides of the stream had been reserved to them in their sale to Penn. Andrew and Hannah, the last Indians in the neighborhood of Birmingham, who lived in a hut or wigwam on the high ground on the east side of the creek, above where the Baltimore Central Railroad bridge crosses the stream, always made claim to this land. I am informed by Amos C. Brinton, of Wilmington, a native of Birmingham, and a gentleman well informed as to the olden times of that locality, that the old Indians did not attempt to till the ground, but went from house to house demanding their meals, and if it chanced that the meal was over, they would scold violently because it had not been delayed for them. Hannah made baskets and gathered herbs to the last. She died about 1800, having survived her husband several years. Andrew was buried on the original tract patented to William Brinton, Sr., his grave being located on Dix Run, about half a mile south of Dilworthtown. Indian Hannah, the last of her tribe, died in the Chester County almshouse. She expressed a wish to be buried in a certain Indian burying-ground which she designated, but was buried with other paupers on the almshouse grounds.

It has been published that the British forces at Chad's Ford, on Sept. 11, 1777, crossed below the ford. This, however, is incorrect. The enemy waded across the stream above the ford. The road taken by the American Reserves to Birmingham meeting-house was up the ravine from William Harvey's house, past the barn, over the hill to and across Dix's Run, up the next hill to and across the road from Dilworthtown to the Brandywine, at a point between the James Brinton and Darlington residences; thence nearly northeast across the Bennett land to the Sandy Hollow road which led to Birmingham meeting-house, the scene of that part of the battle of Brandywine. One wing of Greene's command was shown the way by George Hannum, who piloted them across the Gilpin lands from the Philadelphia and Chad's Ford road to the south of Dilworthtown.

The old Benjamin Ring Tavern, where Washington had his headquarters, was on the north side of the