Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
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Source: April 1982 Volume 20 Number 2, Pages 51–62

The Story of a House : A History of the Hatton House on Old Lancaster Road

Mark L. Tunnell

Page 51

While the history of the tract of land on which the "Hatton House" is situated can be traced back to William Penn, and a grant by him to John Thomas and Edward Jones on July 16, 1681, it was not until 1852 that the first building or structure was erected on this particular property.

On April 26th of that year, the owner, George B. VanLeer, deeded a one-half acre tract for $500 to the "Directors of Common Schools inthe District of Tredyffrin", to be used as the site for the new Mt. Airy School. The one-room school was built during that summer and ready to receive its first pupils - perhaps less than a dozen or so who lived within a mile to the east and to the west - that fall. The school was used for forty years, but after a new school was built at Berwyn in 1892 its pupils were transferred to the newer school building.

The Mt. Airy School then stood empty while alternative uses for it were debated by the School Board. It soon became a haven for hoboes and drifters, who learned to hop off freights as they passed through Daylesford and take refuge in the abandoned school house.

This quickly accelerated its dilapidation. Finally, there was little else to do but tear down the nuisance for the good of the neighboring citizens; William Burwell, who had just finished building his residence next door to the school house, had a family of young daughters to think about.

Page 52

The demolition of the Mt. Airy School was apparently completed by 1900. Over the next few years, the owners of the half-acre of land on which it stood, the School Board, considered whether to erect a new school building there, or perhaps to use it for some other purpose. The lot ultimately was considered too small to make any sensible use of it.

Negotiations were then undertaken to sell the property. In the minutes of the meeting of the School Board held on May 1, 1905, is a report of the adoption of a resolution for its sale to Edmund E. and Susan Hatton, in which it was resolved

"That the School House which was located upon land conveyed to the School District by George R. VanLeer by deed dated April 26th, A.D. 1852, and recorded in the Recorders Office of Chester County, in Deed Book R5, page 330, having become dilapildated and having been dismantled and the Board being of the opinion that it is not advantageous to erect a new building upon the said premises and that the same is no longer necessary for School purposes and that the establishment and support of the common schools in the District will be promoted by the sale of the said lot and the application of the purchase money to school purposes,and an offer of Five hundred dollars, having been made for said lot, do order the sale of same, and do hereby authorize and empower the President and Secretary of the Board,in the name and on behalf of the District and under Corporate seal thereof, to sign, execute, acknowledge and deliver to the purchaser of the said lot, a good and sufficient deed therefor."

Edmund E. Hatton was a remarkable person. By 1905 he was married for the second time. He and his wife, Susan, were to raise thirteen children altogether. They had been renting an old stone house on Russell Road at the time, not far from the Daylesford station, from which Hatton took the train each day to the West Philadelphia railroad yards, where he worked as a railroad employee.

E. E. Hatton had little formal education. His co-workers would fill out his reports for him, and some of them considered him a little slow, but otherwise on the job. He was also the butt of much good-natured teasing. Despite poor health, he worked very hard at his job and at home. The most enduring testimony to his single-minded industry is the house he built for himself and his family on this newly-acquired lot. This he did entirely without training or special tools - its strong construction reflects an innate commonsense and self-reliance in the builder.

Someone gave Hatton two large chicken coops, which he moved onto the land and pushed together. These he fixed up into a suitable shelter for his family. He then moved in and commenced to excavate a foundation directly in front of his shelter.

Page 53

Hatton hired a team of horses and a set of scoops for this purpose, and dug out most of the cellar and cistern area that summer of 1905 during his free time. He next mixed concrete on the spot, in an oldwcoden tank he acquired from the railroad. In the evenings, after work, he would take a wagon and, with his employer's permission, get a load of used bed stone and cinders from the Paoli yards. With the help of a lad of 15, William Smirthwaite, a baggage boy, the load would be brought back to the building site and used as aggregate for the concrete. Into the tank would also go any odd materials Hatton could get his hands on - old pipe, bits of glass, wire, oyster shells, and the like - all of which were then poured into the wooden molds for the walls or railings or whatever was being fashionedthat day. When Hatton would get a bit short of aggregate, legend has it that he was not adverse to getting a little extra stone out of the railroad tracks just opposite his property!

In this manner the cellar walls and fireplace foundations were poured (as, indeed, were eventually the exterior walls for all three floors on top of them). Then Hatton would finish framing the part of the house which was drying. He bought virtually no new lumber for this purpose, instead picking up boards here and there and reconstituting them as, for example, subflooring for his residence.

One evening, while the roof framing was still setting in fresh concrete, a tremendous wind arose and threatened to tear the framing off the house. Mr. and Mrs. Hatton and several of the older children scrambled up and managed to chain the rafters in place,

Pennsylvania bluestone was procured for the fireplace from the quarry at Howellville and, as a mantel, Hatton installed three pieces of thick slate which in their earlier life had lined railroad water batteries used to power the lights and switches in those days.

As the walls rose higher and higher, a finish stucco, using cinders rather than stone in the mix, was applied over them. Inside, all the children old enough to hold a hammer nailed lath to these walls, which were then thickly plastered.

The work was painstaking and slow, of necessity. Indeed, the house was not finished until about 1913, the year the last child was born, eight years after it was begun. Even then, the bathroom never did get its fixtures!

After the front section of the house was completed, Hatton proceeded to pour concrete right over the two chicken coops in the back section, so that the house acquired a "T" shape. The interior of the back section eventually became almost unrecognizable as to its origins, though some tell-tale traces did remain.

Page 54

Oak was selected for the interior finish wood for the floors, baseboards, windows, and door moldings. The detailing on this wood, as with the style of the rest of the house, was simple, reflecting the restrained tastes of the owner. The wood was stained and varnished; the children polished it well with pumice stone.

The house, as built, was in size and use rather different than is presently the case. As one came through the front door, the room to the left was the sitting room, boasting the only fireplace in the house. There was originally a door through it to the dining room behind. The room to the right of the front door was the living room, which explains its size. Across the large doorway could be pulled a folding wooden door from either wall. One could walk through the foyer, as well as through the livimg room, into the dining room (now the kitchen). The dining room was large, running across the entire breadth of the house, as did the room behind it, the original kitchen.

Between the dining room and kitchen was a back stairway. The kitchen had an ice box and a six-lid wood-fired cook stove. There were also several china closets. Behind the kitchen were the laundry room and back pantry. Water was pumped into the kitchen sink from the cistern in the basement, into which rain water was collected from a pipe on the roof, (When this ran dry, off the children would go, pails inhand, to the creek behind the back yard - and when that was dry, then over to the Burwells, who had a well.) One walked across the cistern, incidentally, to reach the door on the east side of the house; on more than one occasion in the early days the original top gave way and a visitor would be dropped into a cold bath!

There was also a front porch, poured of concrete, with a concrete wall around it. The original porch columns and cornices were of wood, and rather ponderous.

One could walk out of the dining room onto porches on either side of the back part of the house. On the western side, the same sort of concrete wall as on the front porch was affixed; on the eastern side, the wall was fashioned of wooden rails, both on the first story and on the second above - the sleeping porch.

There was no paved driveway. In the wintertime, the sleighs of the milkman and others would cut through one opening in the hedge, cross the front lawn, and go out the other.

Like most others of the day, the house had no electricity, no central heating, and no central plumbing. Light was supplied by kerosene lamps and some candles. The only heat in wintertime came from the fire place and the kitchen stove; one generally did not go upstairs except to go to bed, which indeed was a chilling experience on bitter nights, as recalled by Matt Hatton, the youngest son. When one or more of the children were ailing, they were bundled up and moved into the sitting room to convalesce in front of the fire place.

Page 55

On the second floor, there was a large dormitory-like bedroom in the back of the house in addition to the four still existing today; one reached it by means of a hallway to the back of the house which started where the present bathroom is. To the east side of the house on the second floor there was a sleeping porch, with a poured concrete floor and railing.

There were more bedrooms on the third floor, some of which, in the rear, were converted to apartments for some of the married children and their spouses.

In the back yard, a good-sized frame barn was erected, somewhat to the west of the site of the present garage. In it Hatton kept a team of draft horses, which he would hire out to do excavations for other residential foundations in the area,

Susan Hatton also contributed to the family finances by cooking dinner for the sixteen or so farmhands who worked on the adjacent tobacco farm owned by George Mahaffey. She grew many of her own vegetables in a truck patch maintained opposite the house, across Old Lancaster Road on unimproved land then owned by Fannie Nixon. She was also accustomed to putting up a lot of them.

When one reflects upon the kind of hours that Edmund Hatton put in, in building such a "house with what spare time he had, and that Susan Hatton put in, in cooking, feeding, washing for, and minding all the children and in cooking for some sixteen farmhands to boot, the words "hard-working" or "industrious" seem useless, (A neighbor, Mrs, William Burwell, her daughter has recalled, felt sorry for Mrs, Hatton in this respect,)

In Mr. Hatton's case, this hard work did little to preserve his health or, for that matter, his life. On Sunday, March 19, 1922, at 10:30 in the morning while he was sitting in front of the fire place tending the fire, Edmund E. Hatton suddenly collapsed and died.

His death spelled the end of his family's economic stability, for in a day before most workers had any pension or death benefit programs, Mrs. Hatton was left without the means to keep the mortgage paid. Foreclosure was certain. It took place on August 31, 1923, as the sheriff deeded the house to the highest bidder. Susan Hatton, with her youngest children, was forced to move from her residence, first to Howellville, then to White Horse,

The sale was also to mean the slow demise of the residence, which escaped certain ruin only by the intervention of another industrious owner twenty-three years later.

The high bidder at the Hatton foreclosure sale was a realtor, Edward F. Bracken, at $3,350. Within six weeks he resold the house to John Frazer, who was also a Paoli real estate developer, well known for the houses he had built.

Page 56

Frazer did not live in the Hatton house himself, but rather rented it out for a couple of years until he sold it, on March 17, 1925, to a widow named Mary E. Boyd.

Mary Boyd earned her living as a barracks housekeeper for the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol for many years, (The Highway Patrol was to merge later with the Pennsylvania State Police.) After her purchase of the property, she arranged for the Highway Patrol to use the place as a new location for its district barracks. Hatton's old barn was torn down and a seven-bay wooden motorcycle shed was erected in its place in the back yard. The house was electrified, renovated, bath tubs were installed, and the large rear rooms converted to dormitory use.

A sign, displaying the official insigne, was also hung from the front porch. But while the neighborhood reverberated to the sound of motorcycles roaring in and out of the property at all hours of the day and night for the next five years, apparently no suspects were processed or housed there.

Ultimately Mrs. Boyd's rental income and wages from housekeeping were not sufficient to keep the large house. On January 3, 1930 - perhaps to avoid a foreclosure action - she transferred it back to John Frazer, and she and her patrolmen moved to another barracks in Malvern and operated from there,

Frazer was able to sell the house again a few months later, on May 19, 1930, to George and Irene Kenney. The Kenneys moved in, with their three daughters, two of whom were married and had spouses in tow.

One daughter, Mrs, William Griffith, took the train from Daylesford station into Philadelphia to her place of employment each day. During these trips she became acquainted with Bill Smirthwaite, by then a brakeman for the railroad, who related to her his recollections of working as a lad with E. E. Hatton twenty-five years earlier on the construction of the house in which she was now a resident.

On another occasion, Mrs, Griffith brought to the house a pair of ground-hogs which a farmer friend had found and given her as pets. They managed to escape from their pen one day, and made their way through the floorboards, A week or two went by. The ground-hogs became hungry and sampled the electric wiring, which culminated in a loss of power and a lot of singed fur! The hogs were recovered in good shape otherwise.

When George Kenney passed away in 1932, his widow could not continue to carry the house and - just as was the case ten years earlier - it went to foreclosure sale as a result.

Page 57

Frazer was perhaps understandably reluctant to wind up with the property for a third time, particularly with the Depression. The high bidder at the sheriff's sale this time was Charles Fenno Hoffman, who lived in Wayne. Hoffman decided to lease his new acquisition back to Mrs. Kenney, in whom he saw a likely tenant,

To earn her livelihood, she in turn decided to operate the house as a home for foster children from Philadelphia. She did this for the next thirteen years, right through the Depression and Second World War.

These were the days before the state intervened by way of licensing and regulation. An untold number of children thus spent an untold number of their formative years in and around the Hatton house and its large dormitory rooms.

The residents of the house, like many people during the Depression, were, of course, very poor. Winters were especially cruel. Mrs. Kenney had to burn old railroad ties in the fire place to provide heat, and when she was particularly desperate she dismantled and burned much of the wood bracing and beams from the cellar, until the foundations were seriously weakened.

The general maintenance repairs to the house had to be neglected, which took its toll on its appearance and integrity over the years.

There was also no money for luxuries like trash removal; trash was deposited in the unused and deteriorating old motorcycle shed. When that was filled, trash was discarded at the back door.

By 1945 the house was in very bad shape indeed. Hoffman, the owner, had died sometime since, and his executors decided that the time was ripe to sell. It was fortunate for them that there was a severe housing shortage at that time; otherwise it is probable that no one would have wanted to live there or buy it.

But, in view of the times, David and Beryl Patterson did want to buy it, and there could not have been a more fortunate occurrence in the history of the Hatton house. The purchase price negotiated between the Hoffman Estate and the Pattersons was $4,000.

David Patterson, who had a severe diabetic condition, worked for Du-Pont as an engineer; Beryl Patterson was then pregnant with their second, daughter. They had their work cut out for them!

The house was arguably beyond repair. The joists to the rear of the house were crumbling away and dangerous. The two story porch was falling to pieces. The coal-fired boiler in the basement was cracked. The plumbing system was shot. The old motorcycle garage was sagging, and twenty-five years or so of odd jobs were waiting to be done everywhere.

Page 58

To complicate matters, since Patterson was not a veteran due to his illness, he could acquire virtually no hardware or other supplies; veterans had priority.

The Pattersons decided that they really wanted to use the house as their own residence, and not lease out any of the extra rooms to others. They had no desire to run a commercial enterprise or an apartment house, even if they had had sufficient funds to restore the entire house, which they did not. Moreover, since they could not conceivably use all seventeen rooms themselves, and since they needed to consolidate the useful pipe, wire and wood, their course seemed clear: they would tear down the worst parts of the structure, salvage what they could from them, and use what they could to restore the rest of what would be a smaller structure in which to make their home.

And so it was that during the winter of 1945-46, the Pattersons hired Gray Brothers of Paoli to cut the back section of the house roughly in half, tear it down, and haul it away. This part was clearly in the worst shape, Hatton never having been too successful in thefirst place in building over the chicken coops. The charge by Gray Brothers for this demolition was $400.

While Patterson was still doing the last salvaging, Gray Brothers cut a seam up the walls and through the roof with a jack hammer. However, the doomed section would not fall over nor, as bad as the joists were, could it be otherwise coaxed to let go. Finally, Gray Brothers had to sub-contract for a crane and wrecking ball to be brought in. The workers whacked away and succeeded in making a few dents in the house, but in the end Edmund E. Hatton's sturdy construction proved the stronger: the boom on the crane cracked in two! Another crane had to be brought in to finish the job, and a gentleman from Gray Brothers, who admittedly made no money on the project, advised Patterson that as far as he was concerned the house would "withstand any earthquake",

Patterson then had the entire remainder of the house jacked up, and he installed a steel girder underneath it for support. He had the rest of the cellar dug out, completing a task the original builder never had been able to get to, and poured concrete over the earthen floor. He then erected new concrete-block walls with brick headers around much of the cellar. He punched a doorway through to the cistern, which he thereafter used as a cold cellar. This arrangement worked so well that Beryl Patterson was able to store dahlia and gladiola roots right through the winter.

The boiler was taken apart and repaired, and pipe and radiators from the vanished rooms replaced their non-working counterparts in the remaining portion of the house. Still one radiator shy, it was acquired, against their better convictions, on the black market for $55.

Page 59

Dave Patterson made closets for each of the four bedrooms on the second floor by making careful enclosures and skillful plastering. Salvaged doors and trim were installed so that it appeared that these were original details. The third floor was similarly closed off with new walls and another original door.

The remnant of a hallway on the second floor that had led to the rear of the house was turned into a bathroom, and the more serviceable of two old claw-foot tubs was installed therein.

Patterson also had a carpenter make cabinets for the new kitchenroom and added a little lavatory as well.

The place was given a much needed painting, both inside and out. A carpenter fashioned wooden storm windows and screens, and a new shingle roof was put onto the house. A man was hired to help shovel out and cart away the mess inside the old motorcycle garage, and sometime thereafter Patterson pulled this structure down and erected a two-car block garage in its stead. Finally, the driveway, which hitherto had been composed of oyster shells, was macadamized.

The Pattersons also planted the unusual cucumber magnolia tree in the back yard. They also purchased an additional one and a half acres to the east, overnight quadrupling the size of the tract from what it had been since being laid out in 1852.

For the first time in a quarter century, the house really sparkled and looked cared for. The David Pattersons had intended to reside in the house for the rest of their lives. But by 1953 Patterson's long commute to DuPont was deemed by his physician to be dangerous to his health. Very reluctantly, they put the place up for sale, eventually moving to Glen Mills in southern Delaware County to be closer to his work, (ironically, the house they moved into also needed fixing up, and so the process began all over again for them.)

But the house they left standing as 1208 Old Lancaster Road can rightfully be said to be as much Dave Patterson's as the original builder's.

Henry and Maria Bardsley purchased the house in 1953 and lived there with their children for five years.

Bardsley was an engineer, employed by Burroughs. His wife had a flair for gardening that was soon manifest around the grounds; flowers of all kinds seem always to be in bloom. The flower bed planted around the driveway, dating from this time, blooms perennially to this day, to Maria Bardsley's credit. Many ornamental shrubs were planted as well.

Page 60

A basketball backboard was raised by the Bardsleys, and affixed to the garage.

They did not need to make many changes around the house. One of the few they did make was to replace the coal-fired heater with a "modern" oil-fired type. They also put in very fine panelling, which graces one room on the third floor. The interior woodwork in the house, hitherto always stained, was painted over for the first time. The Bardsleys also repainted the living room, from the peach color chosen by Beryl Patterson to a bright red and yellow combination. The same red was continued up the stairwell to the second floor.

When Bardsley was transferred in his job in 1958 to the corporate headquarters, however, the family relocated to Birmingham, Michigan.

Charles John ("Jack") Bergh and his wife Carolyn bought the house at that time. With their two handsome sons and two winsome daughters, they resided in the house for twenty-one years - longer than any other of its prior owners.

Bergh, an inventor by profession, employed much of the basement and half of the garage as a work place to give his ideas form.

The couple closed off the first floor hallway to the kitchen and made a closet out of this area, next to the stairwell. They also spent the better part of two years redecorating the house, favoring wallpaper to repainting to a great extent. They added the corner cupboard in the dining room, and introduced a breakfast bar, complete with a dishwasher, into the kitchen.

Carolyn Bergh added flowers to the bed around the driveway, and in the front yard she planted snow drops, taken from her grandfather's farm. These still manage somehow to bloom in February, to the pleasure - and relief - of the occupants who are otherwise still coping with the grip of winter. The Berghs also had a burro as a pet, tethered in the back yard for some time.

In 1977 the Berghs subdivided their two-acre tract into four lots. Two modern-style houses were built in the rear, and another to the east of the old Hatton house, constructed by builder Dan Pohlig and completed in early and mid-1978 respectively.

The Berghs then moved into the new house on the east.

At this time Mark and Judy Tunnell moved into the old Hatton house, then sitting on about 1/3 of an acre, in July 1978. With them was their six-week old baby boy, Aaron. A daughter, Hillary, came along a year and a half later.

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Tunnel was an attorney by profession, working in a firm in Phoenixville; his wife was an administrator, with an M.A. from Villanova, and at that time the Director of Childrens' Services at the United Cerebral Palsy Association of Philadelphia.

They immediately commenced a fairly comprehensive refurbishing and redecoration of the house. Practically all the wallpaper in the house was steamed off, and the walls, ceilings and woodwork were spackled and given fresh coats of paint. The exposed heating pipes in the house were also concealed, and radiator covers made. The oil burner was replaced by a natural gas burner after a pipeline was put in from the street. For the first time, insulation was installed throughout the attic, and a new roof was put on the house after thirty years. The soffets, downspouts and storm windows were replaced with new aluminum ones. The original shingles on each gable were improved with aluminum siding. And almost all the old lighting fixtures in the house were replaced.

In the kitchen, the breakfast bar, counter tops, dishwasher, and sinkwere taken out or replaced. A new wall, cabinets, and carpeting were installed. A utility sink was put in the basement, and the washer and dryer were relocated from the kitchen and put next to it.

Parquet flooring replaced the linoleum tiles in the foyer, and theshelves in the living room were replaced.

A shower was also added for the first time in the house's history, and the main bathroom restored to a Victorian decor, A period washstand and chest were introduced as the "new" vanity and medicine cabinet, respectively, and a number of brass fixtures were installed.

The rooms on the third floor were, except for the panelling and wiring done by Henry Bardsley, altogether untouched since Hatton had finished them seventy years earlier. The original wallpaper, trim, and stain could still be distinguished. These old walls and the woodwork were bit by bit repaired and repapered, and the rooms again turned into guest rooms.

The garage was also painted and its windows refurbished, while the cement porch in the rear was enlarged, covered, and screened in. New flower beds were fashioned around it, and three old yew bushes and several barberry bushes taken out and dogwoods, firs, and other trees implanted.

It was all a great deal of work - and fun!

But despite all these changes, to many the old house is still known as the "Hatton house", in recognition of the work put into it when the property was first used as a residence, now some seventy-five years ago. He built well.

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BRIEF OF TITLE TO HATTON TRACT IN TREDYFFRIN TOWNSHIP