1860 Census in Newtown (Part 4)

On Monday, July 23, 1860, census taker Flounders was back to work, covering just six households that day. He likely went home to Springfield on Sunday, and so had to commute back to on Monday, by horse or by foot, to the farms at the north end of Newtown. 

Also back to work after the weekend were the 176 children who attended Newtown schools within the year. There were at least four schools in the township at the time, organized into a lower, middle and upper school. There were no cars, no buses, no horses to spare from work on the farm, and so children walked to school, and the schools had to be within reasonable walking distance. 

On the turnpike at the Dunwoody farm was the stone school, built in 1841 in the shape of an octagon, that served the southern part of the township. This style of schoolhouse construction had been popular earlier in the century, primarily because the one room could be heated by a central wood stove. High windows on seven sides permitted light while not distracting the wandering minds of the children captive inside. 

In the center of the township, the had built an octagonal school as well in 1815 before there was compulsory public education. This was the first “private school” in the township, paid for by the subscription of area Friends Meeting and limited to their children, though at times they rented the building out to the public school system as well. 

The Chestnut Grove School was built in 1859 at a cost of $750 to replace another octagonal school on the Lindsay Farm on the turnpike west of the main intersection. A school was also open at the northern end of the township at the Leedom Farm, and that was the school likely serving the mill community. 

The school tax for the entire public school system for the year was $850. Teachers’ pay in 1861 was $25/month. Following a six-week summer break starting on July 1st, the schools re-opened in mid August.  The only teacher listed in the census in Newtown that year was 20-year-old Elizabeth Pratt, living across the street from the Friends Meeting.

On Tuesday, Flounders made better progress, visiting 27 households, including the Cedar Hill cotton factory complex, and on Wednesday he headed west to the farms lying between Newtown Street Road and Crum Creek, north of the turnpike. At the Eli Lewis Farm, he would likely have stopped to talk and watch the construction activity for the new covered bridge being built to span the Crum Creek and carry the Goshen Road across to Willistown and Chester County.  

Across the creek at the Israel Bartram property, the saw mill may have been busy cutting the lengths of timbers and planks for the new bridge. Twenty-five Willistown residents and 33 Newtown residents, all men, had petitioned the county to build a sturdy bridge to replace the existing ford through the stream, which could be impassable in bad weather. The construction proceeded throughout that summer, and by fall, the bridge had been completed. The men who constructed the bridge were craftsmen who did excellent work–the same bridge remains standing in 2011, 151 years later. 

On Thursday, Flounders counted nine households in the southwest quadrant of the township, all farms, and visited with the wealthiest man then in the township, E. Spencer Miller.  Miller was a 42-year-old attorney at law, author of law treatises and a volume of poetry, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. 

He apparently was living in the township for the summer with his wife, three children and four Irish domestics. That year, Miller bought part of the Powelton Estate from the Pennsylvania Railroad, and so that was his likely residence when he returned to teaching at the university.  With the coming of the Civil War, the wealthy Miller raised his own company of volunteers of an artillery unit and served as captain of Company D, First Regiment, which saw action at the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. 

Flounders spent his last day in Newtown on Friday, July 27th, stopping at the remaining 14 households in the Bishop Hollow Road area, all farmers.  At the John Grimm farm at Bishop Hollow and Gradyville roads, he saw 9-year-old Jesse L. Grim, who in 1888 would have a daughter, Alice Grim, who in her 97 years would have a long career as teacher and principal in the Newtown public schools, and for whom an elementary school would be named. 

By the end of the day, Flounders could mark his last page “concluded” and move on to his next destination. Over nine days, he had made his way through the community, and had counted 410 white males, 392 white females, 16 colored males, and 19 colored females, 841 people living in 141 dwelling houses. 

He had made little use of column 14 on his form, which required him to indicate if the person was “deaf, dumb, blind, idiotic, insane, pauper, convict."  Only one person was so identified, 19-year-old Mary Akerman, a domestic living at the Jones Farm with various other farm laborers, including 23-year-old Charles Evans. She was labeled as “idiot” in 1860. By 1870, she had married young Charles Evans, and although shown as unable to read and write, she was not labeled as anything other than Mary E. Evans, still a domestic of the Jones family now living in Lower Merion. 

In the Philadelphia Inquirer that Friday, it was reported that other marshals were having a tougher time of it, visiting some of the low neighborhoods of the city “through Pine alley with its low beastly cribs and to tread the mazes of St. Mary’s and Baker streets," and entering “the palaces of hurdy gurdy dancers penetrated and gambling and bestial desires relieved."

In some of those places, a marshal was greeted with “insolence and low familiarity–in others with curiosity–but in many of the vilest haunts he chronicled more decorum and politeness than greeted him in many fashionable localities.  The denizens of gentler abodes appeared to think his interrogations impertinent and frequently answered with cool disdain.” 

Months later, on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 1860, the United States went to the polls to decide which of the four candidates would be selected for the thankless job of trying to preserve the union intact.  In Newtown, voting was done by paper ballots dropped into a ballot box at the Newtown Square Hotel.  In Pennsylvania, Lincoln captured all of the 27 electoral votes and a clear majority of the popular vote:

Candidate

Votes for

Percent of total

Lincoln:

268,030

56.3%

Douglas:

16,765

3.5%

Breckenridge

178,871

37.5%

Bell:

12,776

2.7%

The Philadelphia Inquirer on the next day declared, “Abraham Lincoln Elected President."  In an era of no instant communication other than telegraph lines, the country knew the results of the election by the next day.  On Nov. 10th, the South Carolina legislature called for a special session to consider seceding from the Union. 

On Dec. 20, meeting in Charleston, they did just that, unanimously declaring "We, the people of the State of South Carolina in convention assembled, do declare and ordain... that the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of 'the United States of America,' is hereby dissolved." Over the next six weeks, six other states in the South seceded as well. In February, 1861, South Carolina diarist Mary Boykin Chestnut wrote, "We are divorced, North and South, because we have hated each other so." 

It would be a bloody divorce: over the next four years of the war, over 620,000 men would die, and thousands more would come home crippled, without arms, legs, and eyes.  At war’s end, 3.5 million southern men, women and children, born enslaved for life simply for the color of their skin, were freed from the bonds of slavery.  As Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword”.  The price had been paid. It would take a much longer time to bind up the nation’s wounds.