Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
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Source: July 1992 Volume 30 Number 3, Pages 124–126


Notes and Comments

Page 124

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More on Early Devon

This spring we received a letter from Simsbury, Connecticut from Walter P. Hutton Jr., whom we have known since we went to high school together, and who was born and grew up in Devon.

Commenting on the article and maps of Devon in our October issue of last year, he wrote, "You of course know of George Smedley Hutton [the George S. Hutton who was so prominent in the Berwyn Citizens Association we discussed in the January issue earlier this year] -- his house and my birth-place are just out of the range of the maps -- but my other grandfather, William Betts Paxson, purchased lot 78 in Devon. My uncle Owen Shoemaker Paxson drew the enclosed map [of Easttown township, shown on the opposite page] in 1902. He skated and swam in the pond to the west which he calls 'Devon Lake', [it is also interesting to note that the Leopard-Newtown Square road was identified as 'Plank Road", and that Waterloo Mills is shown as 'Cabbage Town'.]

"In the stable at grandfather's he kept a pet Percheron, which he bought in Virginia, rode with in a box car to Chester, and walked it home 16 miles -- lunch at Rose Tree. ...

"Mother was the youngest in the family, and I have a wedding acknowledgement from the Earles when she married Dad in 1913. ...

"There is certainly something intriguing and magnetic about the so many years we missed."

Page 125

Page 126

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A School Bus Far from Home

Have you ever wondered what happens to old T-E school buses?

Some of them apparently "just keep rollin' along", as Jean Tucker, a former mathematics teacher at Conestoga High School, discovered on a recent trip to Honduras.

"As we approached the entrance to our hotel on Friday," she wrote in a note to Dottie Heimgartner, the secretary to the principal at Conestoga, "we noticed a large number of day-trippers on the grounds. Their busses were parked along the highway. Since I always check the School District origin of every yellow bus in Honduras, I was curious about these. And guess what? One of them displayed 'TREDYFFRIN-EASTTOWN SCHOOLS' in very old letters! I made Miguel stop and I ran back to photograph the bus.

"What a sorry sight: broken windows, dirty and dilpaidated -- but it was a T-E school bus. ... We could not find anyone who could tell us where it lived in Honduras. ... It would be understandable [however] that they would not have travelled more than 50 miles to get here, so we can draw a radius of 50 miles around Lake Yojoa! ..."

[Dottie Heimgartner]

 
 

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