A circa 120 year old postcard of the Rockdale Dam in Aston Twp.
COUNTY TOWNSHIPS NAMED FOR OLD ENGLISH CITIES
Twelve of
the 21 townships in Delaware County have names with roots in the British Isles.
They are: Chester, Upper and Lower
Chichester, Aston, Ridley, the Darby’s Thornbury, Edgmont, Birmingham, Haverford
and Radnor. The first three, as well as
some of the others are all names for English locations.
Chester
Township’s name is easy to dismiss. It
was of course named originally by William Penn. In fact, Chester Township took
the name Chester before the city, because the ownership was organized before
the city.
As was discussed in the article on
Chester City the third in this series, the name came from Cheshire, England and
ultimately from the Latin word castra.
Chichester,
however, despite the similarity, has an entirely different origin. It was named for an ancient city in the
county of Sussex, England.
This English city was formerly
called Chichester that, is, the city of Cissa.
King of the South Saxons. Through
the years, however, the name became Chichester and was thus transplanted here
by early settlers from that section.
It was not until
1735 that Upper and Lower Chichester became separate
Townships. Until that
time, they had been organized as one with the name Chichester. However, it is
known that as early as 1722 the terms Upper and lower were applied to the two
sections.
Two historians offer two opinions
on the origin of Aston’s name. Dr. George Smith writes that it was probably
named for Aston, a village of Berkshire, England. This English town was famous for a battle
fought there in the year 871. The battle
was between the Danes and the Saxons with the Saxons victorious.
Henry G. Ashmead, however, believes that Edward Carter, one of Aston’s
early leading citizens, names the township for his home “beyond the sea” in the
parish of Bampton, Oxfordshire, England.
Both agree that the township was
known as Northley before 1688. Records
show that in 1688 John Neals, sometimes spelled Nields, was appointed as
constable for the township of Aston.
This is the first recorded reference to the name.
A hundred and thirty years ago, there were still a few old souls who kept the memory of this history with an architectural Easter Egg hunt. One of those was Hugh Shaw, who, with D.R. Esrey operated Powhattan Mills on the north side of Upland Avenue, opposite where there are now buildings of the Crozer medical complex. Shaw was an Englishman who emigrated here at age 22 after a decade of work in the cotton mills near Manchester (as luck would have it, his first year on the job at Crooksville coincided with the Flood of 1843). He never seems to have lost his sense of humor, for as a church trustee, he saw to it that his memorial window featured "tulips and tenterhooks", the front doors surrounds were sheeps-gates for the cheapskates, next to which there were little heads (of cherubs) just as Christopher Wren had decorated his church in Cheapside...which of course was the Eastside! And it gets even better! Why was there a crenelated bit of fortress roof on the southwest side of Third Presbyterian? To help everyone remember Chester Castle (in Chester, England) where on the southwest side was a cenotaph to Matthew Henry, the great commentator beloved by Reformed ministers everywhere. - Shelley Ashfield, Chester Historical Preservation Committee
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