Melissa Alleman

811 Street Road

Tax Parcel # 56-7-13.3

1800

Lemon Tree Inn on L O & S RR

Included in PHMC 1982 Survey

LEMON TREE INN

Reference the Breous Farm Map of 1883, above.

The Dickey Brothers built the village of Mount Vernon in the 1820’s and named it for Washington’s estate. With its three

paper and cotton mills, several shops, post office and scores of workers, it aimed at becoming an industrial city, but it

failed to attract the railroad which went to Oxford in 1854.

A West Chester paper carried the following in 1824:

To be sold at public venue on Saturday, the sixth of March, at the public house of Dr. David Thomas

(the inn at Tweedale) at one o’clock in the afternoon a certain messauge ... containing 168 acres more

or less ... The improvements are a comfortable log dwelling with a spring of good water near the door,

log barn, frame wagon house, and other outbuildings, an orchard of well selected fruit trees with a rea-

sonable portion of meadow. There is a large portion of good woodland ... property of Francis Wallace,

deceased.

Improvements in the area were in keeping with the growth of Mount Vernon. There was a schoolhouse where the Men-

nonite Church now stands, and in 1819 the township took over the road from the village to Dr. Thomas’s mill. His prop-

erty, in what is now Tweedale, is described in a West Chester paper in 1823.

For Sale: 51 acres 40 perches and 6% for roads, large stone house occupied as a public house, good

stone barn, mill, building is 45 x 50 feet, 4 stories high, water fall of 26 feed, water wheel 22 feet diame-

ter, property of Dr. David Thomas.

In 1854 the property was advertised for sale by John Twaddle, said to have been a convivial innkeeper with a Scotch

accent. His name may have been the origin of the name, Tweedale. On the Breous Farm Map of 1883, the post office

name is spelled Twedale, and the family’s name, Twaddell. Mrs. Lavinia Twaddell had land originally Thomas Wallace’s.

A news item in 1870 reported a woolen mill at Mount Vernon burned. In 1895 the post office was closed after seventy

two years. The boom times had ended.

PEACH BOTTOM RAILWAY.(1874-1881) at TWEEDALE - from the series, Peach Bottom Railway by Stanley T. White.

One of the earliest supporters of the idea to build the Peach Bottom Railway was a farmer, miller, and innkeeper who

lived on a medium sized creek, a short distance from where it joined the Octoraro. The man personally graded a mile of

the Peach Bottom Railway, built an idyllic home, in a lovely setting, which survives to this very day. His inn has been

renamed the Lemon Tree Inn. His barns, across the street from the inn, are all in very good condition. His mill, a short

distance away, is marked only by stone ruins and the empty head race.

On the far bank of the Tweed Creek, the Narrow Gauge set its grade and laid its track. Street Road, which connects

Tweedale to the Pine Grove Covered Bridge, was a simple dirt lane in those days.. Peachy, or more likely, John Twad-

dle, built a platform for freight and passengers, on the southeast side of the street. The track was between the platform

and the creek.

On the creek bank, a small section house held tools and other needs for the repair crew that worked the eastern end of

the railroad. Across the road and to the northwest, sat the Tweedale Creamery, which was later a pert of Abbott’s Alder-

ney Dairies.

From the little we have seen, the platform was roughly 6’ by 16’, and about 30” tall. If shelter was needed from the wind

or rain, the section house might have been an option. After 1912, the last version of the LO&S built shelters at some lo-

cations and it is possible that Tweedale was treated to one, but no pictures survive to tell that tale. However, newsprint

says the station and tool house at Tweedale was sold to D. F. Magee in June of 1920.