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Maurice Saul Wildlife Preserve

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This is a contributing entry for Maurice Saul Wildlife Preserve and only appears as part of that tour.Learn More.

As you proceed past the Mill Race on the Old Mill Trail you will find the remains of a dam along Ridley Creek. Rose Valley started when Nicholas Stimmel built the first mill here in 1789 to produce snuff, a popular 18th and 19th century smokeless tobacco He created a dam on the creek with stone from a nearby stone quarry to provide water power for the Old Mill. The mill dam eventually was repaired and improved by Antrim Osbourne for his 1861 woolen mill.


Mill Dam Ruins

Water, Plant, Water resources, Ecoregion

Saul Preserve Dam

Plant, Water, Plant community, Fluvial landforms of streams

Antrim Osbourne Textile Mill

Font, Parallel, Rectangle, Paper

Nicholas Stimmel purchased 1.65 acres on either side of Ridley Creek from Joseph Dicks in 1789. According to property law, it gave him rights, for 999 years, to build and maintain a dam across the creek. Dams were necessary to increase volume and pressure sufficiently to divert water into a mill race where it would enter the mill, turn a wheel, and then return to the creek. The wheel at the Old Mill was on a horizontal axis, not on a vertical axis as we are used to seeing.

Stimmel sent snuff to his son, a tobacconist in Philadelphia, who acquired the mill from his father in 1794. Coincidently years earlier, Thomas Leiper had built a successful snuff mill on nearby Crum Creek. Leiper went on to support the Revolution as a founder of the First Troop, Philadelphia City Calvary. His residence, which he named Strathhaven, is now a museum on Avondale Road in Nether Providence Township.

In the following years the Old Mill was used for many purposes, grinding grain, then bark for the medicinal treatment of malaria, and finally in 1826 as a paper mill owned by Park Shea. He was in business until 1850, when it was abandoned, until Antrim Osbourne revived the mill in 1861. Rose Valley, and other local communities, had many mills throughout the 18 and 18th centuries, driven by the Ridley, Chester, Crum and Darby Creeks. With the arrival of electric power for industry, the mills became obsolete and closed down.

Ham, Peter. The History of Rose Valley. Volume 1. Rose Valley, PA. Rose Valley Borough, 1974.

Osbourne, Dr. Antrim Edgar. Letter to Billy Spiller. Rose Valley Borough History. Published December 6th, 1933.

Image Sources(Click to expand)

Ron Ploeg

Ron Ploeg

Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Rose Valley Collection