Upper Darby Township.
three feet, five stories high, containing for hotel purposes seventy-seven rooms. In this building are also a Masonic lodge-room and three stores.
Fernwood Lodge, No. 553, F. and A. M., which now holds its communications in the Mansion House, was instituted in December, 1875, in the city of Philadelphia, with ten charter members, and with Oliver B. Moss, W. M.; H. M. Hoffner, Treas.; George W. Shirley, Sec. The lodge held its communications for two years in the school-house at Fernwood, and upon the completion of the hall in the Mansion House the lodge removed thither, the new hall being dedicated in December, 1877. It has at present about one hundred members. George W. Shirley is the Master.
Fernwood Methodist Episcopal Church. - This society was organized July 14,1872, with about twelve members, under the charge of the Rev. M. H. Sisty, who remained pastor till the spring of 1873. He has been succeeded in the pastorate by the Revs. John Shepherd, George Mack, A. S. Hood, R. A. Sadlier, Pennell Coombe, and the Rev. N. W. Clark, the present incumbent. The church has also a mission at "West End," Philadelphia. The first meeting of the society was held in the summer of 1872, in a grove near the village, and in the fall of that year they assembled in a frame building erected on the rear of the present church lot. In 1873 the present church edifice built of brick, forty by sixty feet, was erected at a cost of fifteen thousand dollars. There are eighty members of the church at the present time, and a Sunday-school of one hundred and twenty pupils is connected with it, of which George W. Pentridge is superintendent.
Union Mills at Fernwood. - William Hall & Co., in 1867, established at Darby borough a shoddy and waste-wool mill. In 1870 they erected a building sixty by eighty feet at Fernwood, and removed the business thereto. The building contains twenty-four thousand square feet of floor-room, and embraces the carding-room, picker-room, dye-house, scouring-room, and drying-room. There are twenty-one cards and two engines of one hundred and sixty horse-power and boiler of two hundred and four horse-power. The mill produces sixty thousand pounds of shoddy per week.
The public school-house at Fernwood is of brick, two stories in height, and was completed in 1875.
The railroad company have erected a handsome stone depot at the station, and the travel over the road to this place by reason of the cemetery is large; two hundred and twenty-five thousand people visiting the cemetery last year by rail alone, and many thousands by carriages.
Austin, Obdyke & Co.'s Expanding Pipe-Works are located at the junction of Union Avenue and West Chester Railroad, near Lansdowne Station, and, together with dwellings of employés, cover a space of three and a half acres.
Steam power is used in the manufacturing of the expanding conductors, and notwithstanding their increased facilities, this firm is at times unable to supply the demand, the annual production averaging about one million five hundred thousand feet. Messrs. Austin, Obdyke & Co. have established agencies in all the principal cities and towns in the United States.
Abolition Society. - The first society formed in Upper Darby was an abolition society, which was organized prior to May 4, 1830, on which occasion George Sellers, Abram Powell, Dr. Caleb Ash, James Rhoads, Joseph Fussell, Joseph Rhodes, Saul Sellers, Jr., Lewis Watkin, Nathan Sellers, John Sellers, Jr., J. Morgan Bunting, David S. Bunting, and William H. Bunting were appointed a committee to attend the annual meeting of the Pennsylvania State Anti-Slavery Society, Philadelphia, May 17, 1830. The few members of this ridiculed association continued to assemble occasionally until the emancipation proclamation of President Lincoln did utterly away with legalized human slavery in the United States. In this township Thomas Garrett, the noted anti-slavery advocate, was born Aug. 21,1789, his father, Oborn Garrett, owning and operating the scythe and edge-tool works mentioned in the account of the mills on Darby Creek, and with him Thomas Garrett learned that trade. His pronounced anti-slavery views resulted from the fact that in 1815, he, having moved to Wilmington, returned one day to his father's home in Upper Darby, where he found the family indignant and distressed because a colored woman in their employment had been kidnapped and spirited away. He immediately made chase, and tracked the kidnapper to Kensington, where he rescued the woman from them. From that moment until his death, in January, 1871, he was a fearless, active advocate of abolition, and during the ante-bellum days he aided between three and four thousand slaves to escape to the Northern States. In May, 1870, a great parade of the colored people of Wilmington, Del., took place, on which occasion Thomas Garrett, then eighty years of age, was taken in an open barouche through the streets of that city, and on each side a guard of honor was formed, bearing banners inscribed "Our Moses." He died the following year, and his funeral was attended by a vast assemblage of people.
Friends' Graveyard. - On Feb. 4,1860, the Friends' Monthly Meeting of the Western District of Philadelphia purchased of Charles Wiltbank twenty-seven and nine-tenths of an acre near Cobb's Creek and the termination of Market Street, Philadelphia, for a burial-place for members of that meeting.
First Use of Gas. - In 1851, Christopher Fallon purchased a tract of one hundred and forty acres of William Black, on the south side of Garrettford road, and west of the Darby and Haverford roads. He erected in that year a spacious mansion-house. On Dec. 28, 1853, the dwelling was illuminated with gas, made at private works on the estate. The fact is noticeable, because it was the first time gas was used for illuminating purposes in Delaware County.