Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: April 1988 Volume 26 Number 2, Pages 41–49

Early Presbyterians in Berwyn

Barbara Fry

• The Reverend John McLeod
• Thomas Jefferson Aiken and the Aikens
• Henry Fritz
• James Doran
• Frank Stauffer

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A little settlement had grown up along the old Lancaster Road (now Conestoga Road) almost a century before the Trinity Presbyterian Church of Reeseville was organized in 1863. And, after the new Lancaster Turnpike came through the area in 1796, a few buildings; the Springhouse Tavern, a tobacco farm, and a cigar factory, also grew up along the new road. But even at the time Trinity's first church was built, the town had yet to be developed south of the Lancaster Turnpike.

Reeseville became Berwyn in 1877. In 1880 its population was still only 157; by 1887, only seven years later, it had grown to 625!

Here are brief sketches of some of the early Presbyterians who were involved with the growth and changes that took place, both in the church and in the emerging village.

The Reverend John McLeod

The village was still called Reeseville when the Presbyterian Church was organized in 1863.

The founding minister of the Trinity Presbyterian Church of Reeseville was the Reverend John McLeod. He came to Reeseville in his position as Secretary of the American Board of Foreign Missions, to assist with the organization of the church and the erection of a church building. His wife Elizabeth and daughter Lizzie moved here with him, and a son William was born while the family lived here.

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Berwyn in 1881

The McLeod tract originally included most of the land east of [below] Waterloo Avenue and south [to the left] of the Lancaster Turnpike

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The Reverend John McLeod was to serve Trinity as Stated Supply Pastor only until 1864. At that time he was called to be pastor of the Southwest Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia. He remained in that pastorate until 1884, but he continued to make his home here until he was near retirement.

The McLeod property was the old Springhouse Tavern tract, which they purchased early in 1861. This property at one time had contained over 90 acres. The Kugler family, which had owned it through most of the time since 1813, had sold portions of it over the years, including a large section that was sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad Company shortly after it had bought the Philadelphia-Columbia Railroad in 1857. The McLeods bought the remaining 50 acres from the Kuglers.

The McLeods restored the old inn and made it their home. The inn itself was on the north side of the Lancaster Turnpike. (The land just west of the inn they sold to Henry Fritz and William Lobb for their expanding lumber and coal business.)

The McLeod land south of the Turnpike would become the largest portion of the developing village. It extended from down around what is now Lakeside Avenue to Waterloo Avenue. John McLeod laid out Church Avenue (now Main Avenue) and Berwyn Avenue. The highest spot of ground, at the southwest corner of the intersection of these two streets, he gave to the church.

The adjoining land along Waterloo Avenue he sold to William Clark, some of which he bought back later. In 1877 he sold land to the south of the church to the Berwyn Hall and Library Association for the town hall. He was to continue his real estate dealings here as the village developed over the next twenty years.

In 1884, after retiring from his pastorate in Philadelphia, he retired in England.

Thomas Jefferson Aiken and the Aikens

Thomas Jefferson Aiken, Sr. was born in northern Ireland in 1811 and came to America with his father in 1832.

He and his family formally joined the Trinity Presbyterian Church in the fall of 1863, and on the second Sunday of the organized church, January 11, 1863, he became the Superintendent of the Sabbath School. The family, which had earlier lived in East Whiteland, was living in Tredyffrin at the time they came to Trinity. In 1870, when the land in Reeseville from Waterloo Avenue to what today is Bridge Avenue became available, on the death of Samuel White, Thomas Aiken, Sr. purchased this ten acres and moved his family to the village. At first the property was operated as a farm. Later, as the village developed, Knox and Woodbine avenues would be carved into the property. (Earlier in the century this had all been a tobacco farm and the site of a cigar factory.)

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Thomas Aiken, Sr. was elected an elder of the Church in 1864 and then became Clerk of the Session. He would hold these positions until 1874, and also continue to be Superintendent of the Sabbath School. Often he would also serve on the Board of Trustees and as Chairman of that body.

He was a farmer and a weaver. He owned two looms: on the larger one he made rugs, and on the smaller one he wove strip carpeting from rags people brought in to him.

We have pictures of him, with a long flowing beard that grew whiter as he grew older.

He had very strong beliefs, in the strict Protestant traditions of the 19th century, and for the first decade of the Church he led its founders in that direction. A strict observance of the Sabbath, and the proposition that a church should be kept strictly for religious purposes only were two of his strong principles. He had to have been a man of means, education, and ability.

The six Aiken children were witness to his firmness and dedication. They had been nurtured in the Great Valley Presbyterian Church, and were young adults, or approaching this age, when the family came to Trinity.

Dr. John Aiken, the oldest of the children and a surgeon, died in 1866 from a disease he contacted while operating in the field during the Civil War. His death was attributed to his continuing attention to soldiers in need while overlooking his own serious affliction.

Another son, the Reverend Thomas Jefferson Aiken, Jr., began to preach at Trinity in 1868, a year before his graduation from Princeton. He was called as pastor in 1869, and served until 1873. He was again called in 1885 and served until 1901, through the turbulent years of Berwyn's great growth. He was the most prominent of Trinity's nineteenth-century pastors, serving longer than any of the others.

Dr. James Aiken would become an important doctor in the village, and also served the Church as a trustee, ruling elder, and Clerk of the Session. He was the father of Thomas Grant Aiken and of Daisy Aiken [Van Tries], and a grandfather of Thomas Van Tries.

A daughter, Mary Jane Aiken, married Enoch Wells, a prominent preacher and school teacher in the village. Their daughter Ximenia married William Burns, who built Trinity's second, and present, church in 1892. The other two daughters, Elizabeth and Sallie, we have not followed up as yet.

We know that Thomas Jefferson Aiken, Sr., later called "Father" Aiken by the town, lived to an advanced age. He is mentioned in the Sabbath School records as late as in 1895, when he would have been 84, but we do not have a record of his death. He left Trinity for the Wayne Presbyterian Church in 1874, but came back to Berwyn in 1885. Yet he never became a communicant member here, and so his death is not recorded in our records. In his advanced years he was written of as a saintly man, and the beloved grandfather of the Burns and Aiken children.

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Henry Fritz

Henry Fritz went into the lumber and coal business with William Lobb in1860. This was the first major business in the town.

When the Trinity church was being built in 1861, the first carpenter on the job could not keep up with the work. Young Henry Fritz then took over and finished it successfully.

In 1863 he married Lobb's daughter Mary. Both Henry and Mary became communicant members of Trinity. They had two sons.

Henry Fritz served on the Board of Trustees of the Church. When land on Waterloo Road was purchased from the Aikens in 1870 for the building of the church manse, Henry Fritz supervised the construction of the manse. (He also supervised the construction of the first Presbyterian Church in Wayne later that year.)

Unfortunately he was killed in a terrible accident at the old Eagle station of the railroad. The November 5, 1870 Jeffersonian in West Chester reported the accident:

Railroad Accident -- Sad Death

On Friday last week Henry Fritz, respected lumber merchant at Reeseville, this county, was killed at the Eagle Railroad Station. He took hold of a horse at the station, and attempted to hold the frightened animal while the train passed, but was thrown and fell and was struck on the head by a passing car.

Further information about the accident tells us that the frightened horse belonged to a woman nearby, and that Fritz went to her aid when the horse "spooked". This young man was greatly missed.

After the accident, William Lobb promised to continue with Henry Fritz's obligations; and later William's son, Preston Lobb, took over the lumber yard until Fritz's son William was old enough to carry on the business.

Fritz's widow Mary married again. Her second husband was Hugh Steen, a close friend of Henry Fritz.

In 1892, when Trinity's second church was built, the large stained glass window on Berwyn Avenue was dedicated to Henry Fritz, and in 1916 the Fritz children gave a fine pipe organ to the church in memory of their parents, Henry and Mary Fritz.

James Doran

James Doran spent a stormy decade at Trinity Presbyterian Church. He joined the church in 1870 as its 100th member.

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Doran came to Reeseville as a lawyer, and was the Secretary of the Corn Exchange Bank in Philadelphia. Later he succeeded his wife in running a small private high school in Berwyn, at the same time representing an insurance company in Phoenixville. Mrs. Doran and her sister had opened the private high school in a building near the eastern corner of Church (now Main) and Lancaster avenues. (This house was until recently the home of Sarah Nuzum.) At that time the brick building on the corner (now Connor's Drug Store, but originally the bank and the post office) had not yet been built, and the school had a deep front yard.

James Doran became a trustee of Trinity soon after he joined the Church. A "newcomer" to the village, he was often impatient with the way in which the founding members were running the church affairs. He suffered them ethodical way in which the chairman, Thomas Aiken, Sr. moved from dependence upon the pew rents to the modern envelope system of financing the church, and a feud finally broke out between the two when Aiken tried to keep the women of the Church from earning money for the Church with their Mite Society that held musicals and fairs at the church. Doranout-maneuvered Aiken on the matter, and the women's Mite Society continued its activities.

In 1874 Doran became an elder of the Church, and pursued members who had fallen short of their responsibilities. In 1880, however, he was not re-elected to the Board of Trustees. (The Board, incidentally, had some difficulty in recovering some important papers from him, including the charter and some insurance policies.)

Not long after this, the Dorans transferred to the Malvern Church.

Frank Stauffer

Even a casual look at the records of Trinity Presbyterian Church will identify Frank Stauffer as the longest, strongest, and most competent of our church leaders in the 19th century.

It comes as quite a shock, therefore, to find out that he was originally refused membership in the Church -- on the grounds that he bought milk for his family on Sunday! On appeal to the Donegal Presbytery, this body ordered Trinity to grant membership to the Stauffer family, saying that although they did not wish to encourage Sunday trading, the warm weather in July made the transaction necessary. After this decision, Session members Thomas Aiken and Joseph Williams, with their families, both left Trinity and joined the Wayne Presbyterian Church for the next ten years. They returned when the Rev. Thomas Jefferson Aiken, Jr. came back as the pastor in 1885.

In the ensuing election for elders in 1874, both James Doran and Frank Stauffer were elected. While Trinity had originally been founded for the most part by farmers and artisans with their roots in the area, now, just eleven years later, the power was in the hands of "newcomers" from the city. Frank Stauffer also became Clerk of Session, a position he would hold until his death in 1895, and succeeded Thomas Aiken, Sr. as Superintendent of the Sabbath School.

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Frank Stauffer was more cosmopolitan than most of the men in the village. He was born in Philadelphia in 1832. His father, Jacob Stauffer, was a scientist, well known on both sides of the Atlantic. His mother, Sarah Birch [Stauffer], was the daughter of the English Earl of Moreland.

By the time Frank Stauffer came to Reeseville, he was well established in both the political and literary arenas. His writing shows a classical education, but he was fond of saying he was educated in "the school of daily journalism".

In the 1860s he had founded the Mt. Joy Herald in Lancaster County, and had served as Assistant Assessor of Internal Revenue under Lincoln during the Civil War. He would always be a prominent Republican. He had also been recognized as a poet in his teen-age years, and published a book of poems during his years in Berwyn, and had works included in a book of Chester County poets.

His financial success, however, had come from a different literary medium. When he was a young reporter working for the Woonsocket (R.I.) Patriot, he sent off three chapters of a serial novel to Saturday Night. This publication had been floundering, but with Frank Stauffer's three chapters its fortunes began to rise. They wired him, asking for more chapters immediately; he wired back that he had to earn a living and had little time for this type of writing. Eventually they paid him $5000 a year to write serials. He continued to write for them during his years here. His formula was simple: his original story that had sent the circulation up was a tale about a factory maiden who -- at the end of each chapter -- was left in a situation from which she was unlikely to escape. It seems that every factory worker in New England wanted to keep up with what happened to her! Saturday Night was not a sleazy or trite publication, but rather light reading which appealed to the common folk. Few church members probably admitted to reading it.

He also had stories published in many national magazines, and published several collections of his writings: Toward Sunset and Other Poems is a collection of his poetry, while another collection, of what was probably prose, is entitled The Queer, the Quaint, and the Quizzical, a Cabinet for the Curious. Some work went beyond the usual and was more enduring; in the Chester County Historical Society is a Civil War poem he wrote in 1884 called "The Cavalry Charge", that shows his more serious writing style.

Frank Stauffer's work was in Philadelphia, where he was the literary editor of the Daily Evening Call. He was one of the "new breed" that were building fine homes here and commuting to work in the city each day.

He was to have a lot of influence in Berwyn, but he was also to add a lot of fun to the life of the town. He seemed to be a good-humored sort of fellow who also retained an air of humility, never mentioning his own accomplishments as he kept the church records.

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A page from the Minutes of Session in Frank Stauffer's "clear, firm hand" : Courtesy of Trinity Presbyterian Church

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In his earliest years here he did much to reconcile the farmers and artisans who had founded the church with the new members who were ready to race headlong into the industrial world.

Building the town hall was one of these efforts towards reconciliation. In the latter part of the 19th century the church had become the center of village activity to a point beyond which the more religious church people thought appropriate. It was the gathering place for all musical recitals, lectures, and fairs until the Berwyn Hall and Library Association was formed and the new hall constructed next door to the church on land that was bought from the McLeods. Frank Stauffer was a founding member and officer of both the Berwyn Hall and Library Association and the Berwyn Building & Loan Association. Through his efforts, along with those of Isaac Cleaver, Joseph Sharp, and other town leaders, the organizations needed for developing the village came into being. They invested in the Hall project, and saw a handsome profit. Incidentally, the town's Roman Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist churches were all begun in the Berwyn Hall.

His home was on the Turnpike, a little to the east of today's post office, and the property extended back on Waterloo Road. The building is no longer there. It was a frame structure, plastered over to look like stone; a "showplace of the village", Frank Burns called it, and "a triumph of the plasterer's art". In his later years, he gave up much of his writing and became Justice of the Peace and sold real estate. His highway property he made his office, and for his home he moved into the old Presbyterian manse on Waterloo Road.

Frank Stauffer served Trinity through four pastors: Dr. Willard Rice, the Rev. David Hartman, the Rev. Algernon Marcellus, and the Rev. Thomas Aiken. In addition to his duties as Superintendent of the Sabbath School in Berwyn, he also was the Superintendent of the Paoli Mission Sabbath School that was started in 1891 and led directly to the organization of the Paoli Presbyterian Church. Trinity's Session Minutes from 1874 until 1895 are in his clear, firm hand. Rarely was he absent; always was his work outstanding. When he joined the Board of Trustees, the body came alive with his proposals.

Suddenly his time in our history came to an end. On February 13, 1895 Frank Stauffer had been in his office as Superintendent of the Sabbath School as usual. On Tuesday, February 15th, he awoke and went down stairs to attend the manse furnace. Upon coming up stairs he suffered a heart attack and was dead in fifteen minutes. Dr. James Aiken was summoned from Knox Avenue, but nothing could be done.

Fortunately, the children who had been natured through his Sabbath School were waiting in the wings to lead the Church -- and the town -- into the twentieth century.