Green Tree Run Community Association

History Green Tree Run Community Association

History of the Land

Historic development in the district can be defined in three broad periods. In the first, farm settlement and early industry were established beginning in the early eighteenth century, principally by people of German heritage, and continued into the mid-nineteenth century. A number of resources in the district embody this first period. A concentrated area of historic industrial activity in this period was along Trout Run and Manor Road in Montgomery County: the surviving Hagy's Mill site (resource inventory 19), as well as the River Park House (inventory 14), both testify to this earliest occupation. This was followed by similar industrial and residential development along Green Tree Run and Shawmont Avenue. The highest concentration of agricultural settlement in this first period was along Port Royal Avenue. In the second period, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, both country residences and industrial growth were established in the district by wealthy Philadelphians whose access to the district was facilitated by improved transportation along the river, particularly the railroad. The heaviest industrial development in this period was along the river and the railroad that paralleled it, including the Riverside Mills complex (inventory 95). This industrial development was paralleled by the establishment of country residences, such as Rockdale (inventory 116), the property of Philadelphia stone merchant Samuel Prince. Finally, beginning in the 1880s, land purchases by Pennsylvania Railroad executive and developer Henry H. Houston and his successors controlled and limited change well into the twentieth century, extending the period of agricultural activity longer than it survived in most of the rest of the immediate area.

Homes

The great mass of the Riverside Mills' nineteenth-century complex was begun by Edwin R. Cope in 1856, in the same period that brought the establishment of summer estates by Philadelphia merchants in the upland portion of the district. William C. Hamilton (born 1819) began as the manager and part owner of the Riverside Mills, and went on to purchase it in 1865; it continued to expand under family control into the twentieth century. Other surviving mill remains and related structures can be found along Green Tree Run, just north of Shawmont Avenue at the southern edge of the district, although there is little documentation about their history other than their surviving fabric. Historic insurance atlases indicate that the land northwest of Shawmont along Green Tree Run was a single property in 1875, owned by Charles Thomson Jones. Given the early nineteenth century date of construction of the mill workers' houses on Shawmont, it is probable that this had been a single property since that period at least.

Finally, the remains of another water-powered, early nineteenth-century mill survive to the north of the tenant farmer's house on the Samuel F. Prince property.