Thomas Massey House: Three Centuries of Pennsylvania Architecture
Near Wilmington, Pennsylvania
The house nearby is a quiet archive of three centuries of Pennsylvania building. Thomas Massey, an English Quaker, acquired land here and built the brick section of this home in sixteen ninety-six. His son replaced the original central wooden section with stone around seventeen thirty.
A stone kitchen replaced the wooden one around eighteen hundred, and a room above that kitchen was added around eighteen sixty. Every generation left a layer. The house grew outward and upward as the family changed and as the colony became a state.
In nineteen sixty-four it was deeded to Marple Township and restored. It now stands as one of the finest surviving examples of early Pennsylvania rural architecture, a building that accumulated itself over a century and a half of continuous family life.
