Eddystone, Pennsylvania

The tiny borough of Eddystone, tucked at the mouth of Ridley Creek along the Delaware River, owes its existence to a textile factory. In the eighteen forties, a businessman named William Simpson founded the Eddystone Print Works and named it after the famous Eddystone Lighthouse off Plymouth, England. The works relocated here from near Fairmount Park in eighteen seventy-three, and the company town that grew up around it was incorporated as its own borough in December of eighteen eighty-eight.

Swedish settlers had lived in this spot as early as sixteen forty-one, making it one of the earliest European-settled corners of what would become Pennsylvania. The factory eventually gave way, but Eddystone kept its name and its footprint on the map.