The Brinton 1704 House: Quaker Stone, Brandywine Ground
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
The stone house built by William Brinton Junior in seventeen oh-four is one of the oldest surviving Quaker houses in the United States. Brinton's father had emigrated from Staffordshire, England, with his family to escape religious persecution, and when William Junior built this house for his wife Jane and their six children he modeled it on the medieval English architecture of the family's English home. The walls are twenty-two inches thick.
The leaded casement windows and indoor bake oven remain. On September eleventh, seventeen seventy-seven, British and American forces fought the Battle of Brandywine a short distance away, and the proximity of this house to that battlefield earned it further historic recognition. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-seven and is open to the public as a museum.
