Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: July 1986 Volume 24 Number 3, Pages 91–98

Recollections of Paoli

Mary Eachus

Page 91

[These recollections of Paoli, during the first half of this century, are adapted from an "oral history" interview with the author, conducted on July 18, 1978. At that time she was almost 76 years old.]

I was born in 1902.

The Eachuses and, I think, the Garretts -- my grandmother Eachus was a Garrett -- lived around West Chester. The Eachus Dairy in West Chester was run by one of my cousins. My grandfather Eachus then lived in Malvern, but I never knew him as he died before my father was married. He ran the livery stable in Malvern. After his death, Dad sold it and built one here in Paoli.

My grandfather Collier, I believe, came from Ireland. My grandmother Collier was a Lawrence; they were English and were here before she was born. My grandfather Collier lived down in the Valley, on the Wilson farm, in the house that Colkett Wilson later lived in. My grandfather was the superintendent or manager of the Wilson farm. The Collier family all sort of grew up there. My mother was the one girl, with six brothers.

In fact, I was born down in the Valley. Mother was at the time keeping house for her brothers who lived down on the farm. Then one of them, my Uncle George, married Aunt Emma and took over the farm, and Mother came up to Paoli. So we've always lived here in this area, around Paoli.

Page 92

As I said, Dad ran a livery stable business in Paoli. After my grandfather Eachus died, Dad built the livery stable here -- and then the house was built! It was just shortly after they moved into the house, which was built in about 1899, that the Paoli Inn burned down. When he and my mother were married they came here to live.

The livery stable was where the Wawa store in Paoli is now. When the horse-and-wagon age went out Dad just couldn't believe horses were gone. In the early 1930s he finally gave away the last three horses we had to someone on a farm, to be put to pasture. He then rented the livery stable building out, first for a garage to Francis Motors, and then to Bill Murray, who came along and took it over. We rented it to him for his electrical store. He had started out with a Gulf gas station on the little point between the highway and the Paoli Pike, but he was selling a lot of things on the side. He wanted to go into the electrical business, so he asked Dad about taking the place over. He redid the place completely to make it into a sales place he could use.

He left my dad a little office up on the second floor, where Dad could hide himself and do what he wanted to do. Dad was the assessor for Tredyffrin Township for several years,

Then it was Bill Murray's, until he sold it. And then it was nothing, until it was torn down and the present building -- the Wawa store and real estate office -- was put up there. The real estate office is right where our house was.

I was the oldest in the family. My sister Helen was five years younger. Jack was two years younger than she, and Elizabeth was a year and a half younger than Jack.

I remember that when I was a little girl we played a lot of pick-up ball. My brother was always interested in baseball and played on Main Line teams. He played on the Men's Club team at Good Samaritan when he was younger, and afterwards played for the Narberth team in the Main Line League. So we all sort of followed baseball. My dad was interested in it too.

Next door to us was Matthews', where Lydie Matthews' Uncle Charles and his family lived. All his children were born right there, and we were playmates and grew up together. And Ethel Entricken lived in half of a double house over where the Telephone Building is now. She and I have birthdays two months apart, and we grew up together, and over the years played together. My dad built a playhouse down in the back yard for me to furnish and play in with dolls and what not.

And I remember we also played a lot of croquet. The year of the polio epidemic around here many children had polio. One of them was my cousin who lived near here; one was a boy who lived the next door beyond where Matthews had the store; and another was a child who lived in the other half of the double house. So we were all quarantined, and we just about wore out the croquet set because we didn't have much else to do.

Page 93

The polio epidemic was around 1916. The children were all taken to the Chester County Hospital in West Chester, which was the only medical facility in the area. There was a hospital in Bryn Mawr too, but Chester County was the one used by all the people here. The three people that I mentioned all recovered, with some paralysis. But they were able to get around and do things. At that time we had only a few doctors here. Dr. Hughes was here then, and Dr. Baugh was still practicing. And there was Dr. Hamilton in Malvern, but that was about it for doctors. Doctors were as few and far between as the houses! It was a far cry from what it is now, with our medical centers and hospitals.

The Good Samaritan was the first, or oldest, church in Paoli; in my remembrance it's always been here. There weren't many houses between here and the Church then. Mr. Walton, who was then the rector, drove a carriage, a runabout, with one of Dad's horses, a mare named Maud, for all his pastoral calls. At the end of his calls he would stop at the stable and Dad would take him home, and then bring the horse and wagon back.

Our Church started in what is now [in 1976] the Library building. It was a chapel then, and that was the beginning of the Presbyterian Church here: We were sort of a mission church of the Trinity Church in Berwyn. We were in the chapel, I think, from 1899 to 1908. After the Presbyterian Church moved across the road to the other side of the Lancaster Pike, the Methodists used the chapel. They were there until they moved into their church on Valley Road (it is now the Masonic Hall) and then later to where they are now. So the Chapel was first the Presbyterian Chapel, then the Methodist Chapel, then it was the Town Hall, and then it was the Library!

I went to Sunday School in the Chapel. On the day we moved into the new Church everybody marched across the highway. It was really a big day! Of course, Momma was afraid to let her little girl walk across that big highway back in 1908. It was sort of a hard-top road then, not like the macadam roads now, but it was sort of paved.

There was also a Catholic Church in Berwyn. Every Sunday morning my Dad would take the wagon with the seats along each side over to the Dingees and take their hired help, who were Catholics, down into Church. The Dingees' home was where Colonial Towers is now. (Actually, the Devereux School was there for a while, and then when it moved those buildings were torn down and Colonial Towers was built.) The Dingees owned the ground that our Church was built on, on the highway, too; it was partly given to us and the rest was bought from the Dingees.

They also owned all the land on the south side of the highway, where the shopping center is now. One of my uncles, Uncle George, was the head farmer there. He came from the Wilson farm to the Dingee farm, and was there for several years.

Christian Endeavor was very active at that time in our Church, and there were also the Ladies' Aid Society and the Missionary Society. There was quite a large group of us in Christian Endeavor.

Page 94

After I moved away it kept on, and they still have reunions of some of the older people who were active in it at that time. It was a county-wide organization, and inter-denominational. One of the people who was in our group, from West Grove, became a state officer.

All our family -- my brother and sisters and I -- went to the school on Valley Road that is now an apartment. (When she lived there, Helen Burwell would say, "I'm living in the third and fourth grade rooms."! She came here to school too.) After we finished there, we went by train down to Berwyn and walked from the Berwyn station back to the high school.

It was Tredyffrin-Easttown High School back then. There were 27 in our class at graduation. After I graduated from high school I went to business school in town. I completed the course in twelve months -- I don't know exactly why -- and got a teaching certificate.

While I was doing that I also worked in the Paoli post office with Kathleen Wetzel, in the mornings before I went down on the train, and in the afternoons when I came back. The post office was the second building up by the station; there was the station, then the newsstand, and then the post office, right in the corner. It wasn't a very big building. Mr. McCanna was the postmaster then; he had the news agency, or newsstand, too. Kathleen Wetzel worked there all the time, and for a year and a half I was a helper.

The school I went to in Philadelphia was the Banks Business College, but they had Normal School courses too. Between finishing there and getting a teaching position, I worked in the office over at Bracken's Coal and Lumber yard. Then in February of 1922 I went down to Tredyffrin-Easttown to teach, because the teacher who was there was pregnant. (She had been my teacher there too.) I was there for two and a half years, and then I decided that I needed to get away and be somewhere else.

I wasn't sure, as I grew up, just what I wanted to do. I took the secretarial course in high school, and after I graduated one of my uncles thought I should go on in school. So I did. By the end of two and a half years at Berwyn I had paid him back what he gave me. Then I decided I should, I guess, see the world. So I went to western Pennsylvania! But I made some nice contacts through moving around and getting to different places.

I was twenty-three then. I was in western Pennsylvania for two years. I taught bookkeeping, shorthand, typewriting -- the regular commercial, courses. I had been the only commercial teacher in Berwyn, but in the school I went to there were two teachers in the commercial department.

Then I came back to West Chester, to Darlington Seminary. I was in the office and teaching too. It was a very small private school, over where the nursing home is now, just outside West Chester.

Then I had an opportunity for a position at Penn Hall, out in Chambersburg. I decided to take it because Darlington was getting smaller and smaller, and I thought I'd better look out for me!

Page 95

I went there in February 1929. Penn Hall is gone now too,, but I've been gone from there myself for a number of years. It was a prep school and junior college, adjoining Wilson College. I taught the secretarial course there too, and prepared many secretaries for good jobs, and bookkeepers too. I still hear from some of them after all this time.

After five years, I decided it was time to come back home. The others in the family had all been married and had their own homes, and Mother and Dad were here alone. I wrote a couple of letters, asking about positions. I knew that with the certificate I had I could not get another teaching position in the area. Even though I had gone to summer school at Temple and had done some work at Shippensburg, it was not enough for a degree -- and you just couldn't get anywhere without a degree at that time. So I inquired about office work and went for an interview down at Shipley during Spring vacation. The business manager and I agreed that I could handle the work -- and last Spring [1978] was my thirty-fourth year at Shipley School.

At that time we still lived over on the highway. But then in 1950 Bill Murray, who had rented up to that point, decided he would like to buy the corner property from my father for his store. At one time Dad owned the ground all the way through to Wistar Road for pasture land for the horses, but over the years he had sold off all the lots but one. So he sold the store and old house to Bill Murray, and built this house here on Circular Avenue and moved over here. Dad was with us for only two more years, and Mother for four, but they both did live here. My cousin Bess Lawrence also came to live with us a number of years ago, and the two of us are still here.

When I was still in school they had toll gates on the pike. There was one at the northeast corner of what is now Route 252 and Route 30, and they were located just about every two miles from there on down beyond Bryn Mawr. I remember going with one of my uncles when I was about seven or eight years old on a load of hay. He was delivering hay from the Howland farm on Swedesford Road to Bryn Mawr, and I was allowed to pay the tolls all the way down the highway!

It was a toll road for quite a few years. I think it was a nickel that you had to pay at each toll gate, to pay for building the highway and for keeping it up. The building that was the toll house here in Paoli was afterwards moved from there to a property in Wi11istown Township, and later Lowell Gable built the building that is there now. It resembles some of the older toll gates along the way; I think he used one of the patterns for the toll gates that had been along the road. The man who collected the tolls in that particular toll house, in the years that I remember, was named Joseph. His family grew up here in Paoli.

I don't remember how long it was a toll road, but after it became a public road they began widening it. We had a lawn in front of the house at one time, but gradually the highway came practically to the front porch.

Page 96

The railroad, of course, was all steam to begin with, in its early days. The water to supply the steam engines came from a spring down on Spring Street. They had a pumping station there that pumped the water up to tanks by the railroad tracks. Even after the electrification from here to Philadelphia, the people had to change trains in Paoli. (I remember one man in particular, who lived out near Pittsburgh; when the conductor said, "Paoli -- all change" he said, "Well, what if I don't have any change?") But you had to change to a steam engine to go on beyond Paoli for many years, to get even to Malvern or Coatesville or anywhere. It was in 1916 that the electrification from Philadelphia to here was completed. The first train ran on September 11, 1915. The total cost, I believe, of the electrification was $25,000, and it took 200 men over two years to do it. The station stayed the same for a long time, and then later the new station was built in the present situation, down on the track level.

I was still in high school during the First World War, but we were affected by it. Suddenly life became different. There was a Marine camp, Camp Fuller, down past Matthews' farm down Cedar Hollow Road. It was between the two railroads, the Trenton cut-off and the Chester Valley Railroad. A big white house was used for the headquarters; it's still standing there, but it looks as though it should fall down. So there were a lot of Marines, a lot of service people, in Paoli. We never had very much to do with or about them, though. My family always sort of kept us home, I guess. Some of the people went to dances and things down there, but I never did. We were always too busy with something!

But the war did make a difference, of course, with all the young men going off to war. And things were getting scarce and prices were getting higher. My grandmother was sure we were going to run out of sugar or that we were going to run out of this and that. So she would send us off to the store to buy as much as we were allowed to buy at each time.

Going back a little further than that, there used to be a store down where Route 252 crosses Route 30 now, Schofield's Store. (It had been Cutler's, I think, before it was Schofield's.) I knew and know Helen Schofield, whose grandfather opened the store. Her father ran it for awhile too. They had everything. It was a big old country store, with a porch in the front. They had groceries and dry goods and all kinds of sewing things and meats and everything. There were meeting rooms up on the third floor -- I think the family lived on the second floor -- for lodge meetings and things. I remember walking down there frequently with my grandmother to buy things.

The Red Cross was across from where the shopping center is now, in what was later the Wayside Inn before it was torn down a few years ago. But during the First World War it was the Red Cross building, and we used to go down there sometimes to roll bandages and help out.

Page 97

Then after the Red Cross headquarters moved to Berwyn, it became an inn. It had also been an inn earlier, I think, and there was a stable for the horses on the other side of the highway, on the corner where the Gulf gas station is now.

Then during World War II there was what we called a "stop-over" on Valley Road, just a few steps south of the pike. Mrs. Nelson Edwards was very active in it and sponsored it, and we all helped her by serving as hostesses there when we could. Soldiers coming and going would stop by there while waiting for trains or waiting for transportation to Valley Forge Hospital. We had a hot plate there, and kept cookies or buns or something, and made coffee. We kept it open until ten or eleven o'clock at night, and it was open almost all day. Mostly there was at least one hostess there, but sometimes there wasn't. I saw Mrs. Edwards just before she went down to Devon Manor to live, and she said, "I have so many boxes of letters from the people we took care of. I don't know what to do with them, but I hate to throw them out!" Her daughter lives down the street, and she said that she helped her mother sort them out and read them again. Mrs. Edwards was very active in the community, but she was most active in this service for the servicemen, and it didn't matter what branch of the service they were in. (I don't know what happened to all the letters; her daughter may have brought them back here after her mother died suddenly about a year ago.)

After the First World War and during the 1920s, of course, there were many changes in Paoli -- more trains, more people, more travel, a great deal more, more mobility. I can't remember exactly when it was that Dad began selling off his lots and building new homes, on down to Wistar Road and then all along Wistar Road.

What is now Richmond Road was a ball field. They had grandstands and everything. We would go down to ball games there. The town just seemed to grow and grow and grow.

I was at Penn Hall during the Depression, and there were changes there too. It was a private school, and many people who had been sending their children to private school could no longer afford to do so.

Actually, that was the beginning of the growth of the junior college program. People who wanted their children to have more education but who didn't feel they could handle four years of college would send them to junior college. They'd take the courses that were practical, courses like home economics and secretarial work and things of that kind. And music: there was quite a music department there too. But people could go out and get something to do or get work in the places they wanted to with two years in a junior college.

Of course we were glad, to be living in a place where we had our room and board. The headmaster told us, "I can't afford to pay you much salary, but I can afford to keep you." So for the nine and a half months that we were there we were at least taken care of.

Page 98

I enjoyed teaching because I felt that I was doing something worthwhile, helping people who wanted to learn the things that I could teach them. For the most part, all of my students were taking secretarial work because they wanted to, because they wanted to learn to be secretaries or bookkeepers or things like that. And that was a rewarding experience to me.

But coming home and being a part of things here has been pleasant too, because I've been closer to my family, for one reason, and because I've been fortunate in being active in my Church and called upon to do various services in the Church. And I've found that a very interesting and rewarding thing too. I think that in years of membership I'm possibly the oldest member of the Church -- and maybe the oldest in years too, but I don't know for sure. I joined the Church in 1915.

I was on the Sessions for three years, then off for a while, and then I was on for six years. I was Clerk of Sessions for the last six years, which ended in 1976. Before that, I had been a Deacon in 1966 and 1968, and. after I was a Deacon I was a Trustee for three years, and then later served on the Sessions. I've also been on a committee of budgetary for six years -- I just finished that six-year term recently -- and I enjoyed doing that very much.

When I was in school here and living at home, I also taught a Sunday School class. My last teaching was with the Women's Bible Class, which has now disintegrated completely. Mrs. Moody had been the teacher for long years, and she was giving up teaching and all of the people that were in that class were as old or older than I. There are still about three of them around.

So I have had an active part in the life of our Church.

I was also on the Library Board, beginning in 1946, for maybe ten years -~ I'm not exactly sure how long -- and was the treasurer of the Library Board. But since then I haven't been very active so far as the Library is concerned.

I've tried to take a part in the community. When I came home, I thought I must get myself into things and know what's going on, so when anybody asked me to do anything I sort of tried to do it.