Submitted by Leona Baker, Historical Society of Salisbury Township

This month's jaunt into the past features the small house on the south side of Lincoln Highway at the bottom of Gap Hill. Today, that attractive house presents its handsome stone walls to passersby. That probably was how it looked to Gen. Lafayette as he passed by on his tour through Lancaster County in 1825.

The property, with no mention of a building, was included in land purchased from the Penn family in 1741, though the names of the purchasers are obscured. There is a gap in the succession of deed transfers. As late as 1900, many properties were informally handed over to the next generation.

The first recorded deed so far discovered is one from 1821, which reads that "eight acres, 55 purchases" were sold by John Griffith, executor for his parents' estate. That deed mentions a building, the first account of a dwelling there. It is generally accepted that the front portion of the house dates from that time. Pig bristle mortar, deep outside walls and layout of the rooms reflect that supposition.

That deed transferred those eight-plus acres to Maxwell Kennedy, a wealthy landowner who laid claim to much of the area between what is now Newport Road (Route 772) and the Chester County line. By the 1860s, when his sons, first Winfield, then Sylvester, owned the property, the outer walls had been covered with stucco. This would have been a mark of prosperity, for bare stone walls had become synonymous with the frontier style of architecture with its focus on function rather than aesthetics.

By 1889, when Thomas Bitzer became the owner, a two-story stone addition had been attached to the south wall. Sometime in the early 1900s, Alice Trout, Bitzer's niece, moved to the house. When the American Chestnut Society announced it was researching ways to combat the then raging chestnut tree blight in the United States, Trout planted 25 hybrid American/Chinese chestnut trees. Her extensive notes of tree growth, sapling survival and yearly crop are an integral part of the National American Chestnut Society archives. Within seven years, she was able to earn a good income selling bushels of fat chestnuts.

But those hybrid trees were not, as hoped, a cure for the chestnut blight. Their offspring did not carry the immunity. In 1946, Trout sold off that chestnut grove since the trees no longer produced a profitable crop. Those original trees, now more than 100 years old, do still produce edible nuts, but their saplings die within 10 years.

Trout continued to live in the old stone home near the road until 1961, when advancing age forced her to seek a more easily cared-for residence. Dr. C. J. Breyer, whose own meadow abutted the Trout land, purchased Trout's acres in 1961. The next year he sold it to the present owner, Richard Patterson. During the 64 years the Pattersons have enjoyed the old house, they built a bay window on the east side off the front room and added modernized facilities throughout. They also removed the stucco on the front of the house, again exposing the beauty of the local fieldstone walls.

When Salisbury Township celebrates the 200th anniversary of Gen. Lafayette's 1825 tour in July, the route that today's Gen. Lafayette re-enactor takes will pass the house, looking much as it did 200 years ago.