A curious take on Bucks County history
Place names in Bucks County history are a source of near endless entertainment and surprise to anyone doing research. Weird, funny, tragic. That’s what 300-plus years of European development will do.
The first time I drove rural Elephant Road in Bucks County I wondered where that name came from. Was there a circus nearby? Perhaps a farm where elephants pulled plows? Headquarters of the Republican Party? I knew from a tour of Oscar Hammerstein’s estate with his grandson in Doylestown that a former owner kept elephants and built a bathing pool for them outside the barn. But that’s nowhere close to Elephant Road that runs from Dublin to Lake Nockamixon. By the time I reached its intersection with Ridge Road below the lake a few years ago, the mystery dissolved. A sign with the image of a white elephant fastened to a pole outside a three-story building declared “Elephant Hotel 1848".
The road is named for the former hotel popular in its time for booze and a bed. That’s what the founder offered when he opened for business sometime before 1848. The fieldstone building originally featured a larger, oval sign nearly 4 feet long framed in iron. Historians are certain it was repainted from an earlier date.
In the 1800s, white elephants symbolized royalty and hospitality in Asia. Perfect for a hotel and taproom in early Bucks. Wayfarers navigating bumpy, muddy Ridge Road from farms around Haycock Mountain en route to and from Perkasie sought shelter and oh-be-joyful ale at “The Elephant”.
After many years, business faded. Archeologist Henry Mercer in the early 20th century obtained the sign to hang in his new museum in Doylestown. In return, he replaced it with a smaller replica. Last spring, a new owner bought the property for $505,000 and is in the midst of a major renovation, inside and out. The white stucco exterior has been stripped away and its underlying stone repointed. Henry Mercer’s replica “Elephant Hotel” sign is in storage inside. Stay tuned for what is to become of the old hotel.
No Irish jig for this township
Now check out the story of how a Central Bucks municipality got its name.
Irish and German settlers in 1741 petitioned county court to set out borders for a new township where they lived. No one agreed on a name. New Dusseldorf or County Killaraney would have been nice.
Enter John Chapman. The court appointed him to map out the township. Tripod and survey instruments in hand, he set boundaries following Route 313 to the west, Tohickon Creek to the north and east, and a survey line across open space to the south. It delineated 31 square miles of a thriving German-Irish farming community. Villages included Dublin, Fretz, Keelersville, Kulps Corner and Weisel.
A township name? That fell to Chapman. I’m guessing he wasn’t keen on an Irish or German name. Rather he settled on the former manor of a British king in England. Bedminster.
Assassin ends life of village’s namesake
Many towns in Bucks are named for famous forebears. Langhorne, Hulmeville, Plumstead, Doylestown and Morrisville are a few. There is only one named for a local man who was assassinated.
Arthur Erwin, a 6-foot 6-inch Irish immigrant with a bright personality, purchased 2,555 acres of the township fronting the Delaware River in the late 1700s. As colonel of the Second Battalion of Bucks County Militia in the American Revolution, he arranged boats for George Washington’s famed Christmas crossing of the Delaware in 1776 and fought in the Battle of Trenton. The colonel married twice and fathered 11 children. An acquaintance described him as “a gentleman of culture and affluence, shrewd business habits, untiring energy, dignified and commanding in appearance with a pleasing and courtly address, and gentle in manner and benevolent in disposition.”
Folks began referring to his property as Erwinna. The Post Office later made it official. In his lifetime, Erwin expanded his estate to extensive holdings in Luzerne and Steuben counties in the wilds of the Pennsy-New York border. While touring his Steuben property in 1791, the colonel evicted a squatter before meeting with a friendly tenant in his cabin. The revenge-seeking trespasser waited in ambush in the early evening and fired a single shot into the house, killing Erwin, 65, as he sat chatting with the occupant. The assassin escaped, never to be identified. The colonel’s body arrived home for burial in a family plot on the Delaware riverbank a short distance above today’s bridge to Frenchtown.
Today, the village of Erwinna lives on in a postcard setting of rural beauty described by historian George MacReynolds as “a mosaic of matchless landscape” with its covered bridges, palisade cliffs, rushing creeks, picturesque farms and islands dotting the river front.
Sources include “Place Names in Bucks County” by George MacReynolds published in 1942; “The Villages of Bucks County: A Guidebook, 1987" published by the Bucks County Planning Commission; “Arthur Erwin” posted on Bucks County government’s website at https://www.buckscounty.gov/1552/Arthur-Erwin, and “Assassination Proclamation” published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on July 13, 1791.
Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: An Upper Bucks hamlet is named for the world's largest land mammal
