February 8, 1851 wasn’t much different from any other day …
… except that there was a very important real estate transaction, whose deed shows that:
“Joseph Lippincott (Farmer) and Beulah his wife of the Township of Chester in the County of Burlington in New Jersey” sold 120 acres of farmland to “Daniel L Miller Junior of the City of Philadelphia in the State of Pennsylvania (Merchant) … for and in consideration of the sum of twenty one thousand dollars lawful money of the United States of America to them in hand”.
The Clerk of Burlington County duly filed it permanently in Deed Book C5 starting on page 404, where it remains today for anyone to read. Here’s a copy we downloaded you can read yourself, in all it’s cursive glory, in the handwriting of a clerk who probably left this earth a century and a half ago.
This was the first tangible step in creating the “summer resort town” of Riverton, February 8, 1851.
Daniel Leeds Miller, Jr. was making this purchase in his name on behalf of nine other partners interested in carving a new town out of this farmland, which straddled the old road from the river to Moorestown (today’s Main Street and Riverton Road). Their intent was to create a corporation to develop it but in those early days that required an act of the legislature which took another year, so in the meantime the entire endeavor worked as a partnership.
The Miller family was represented in four of the ten founding households. In addition to Daniel, three of his sisters were included and that year those three all built houses next to each other on Bank Avenue (which already existed as a lane).
Daniel’s sister Elizabeth Miller was married to William Parrish (they built 311 Bank), sister Anna was the wife of Robert Biddle (at 309) and sister Rachel was married to Robert Biddle’s brother William and they built 307 Bank (demolished against strong public sentiment in the 1980s for the expansion of the then-Baptist Home).
Daniel had married Anna Pancoast Ridgway 8 years earlier at their Philadelphia Quaker meeting, a ceremony attended by most Riverton founders and a number of notable Abolitionists, including Lucretia Mott and her family, William Henry Furness, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They lived in Philadelphia on Mulberry (Arch) Street between Front and Second.
All (or nearly all) of the founders’ houses were constructed that summer of 1851 even though all the land was still in Daniel’s name while waiting for the New Jersey Legislature to approve their “Riverton Improvement Corporation”. A few of his partners requested that he subdivide out their lots so they weren’t in the awkward position of owning houses on land owned by someone else.
Daniel and Anna Miller’s summer home here was the house which became 405 Bank Avenue. It apparently began with a design by architect Samuel Sloan similar to the others though acquired a Mansard roof third floor at some point. The Millers sold it to John Stokes in 1854.
Daniel and Anna built another summer home at the foot of Howard Street by the 1858 map by Parry, Sykes and Earl, which vanished from that spot by the 1860 edition, when a similar notation appeared at the foot of Fulton Street, as shown here in the 1890 Otto Koehler Birds Eye View of Riverton. There was complexity afoot at this time, involving litigation and foreclosures that would make interesting research.
Like our other founders, Daniel Miller was active in the Abolitionist movement but his business was primarily as a merchant in petroleum, with an office around Front and Walnut Streets, convenient to the steamboat wharf the Riverton boats used.
The Millers raised ten children, plus at least one who did not survive infancy. Daniel Miller died in this house in 1871 and Anna sold it in 1878 to move back to Philadelphia near Rittenhouse Square. In 1913 this house was moved, pulling back from the riverbank to face Fulton Street, where it still stands, carrying the house number 201.
“Discovering and Retelling Riverton’s Stories”
Great stuff!
I, for one, would love to know the minutia of your “Interesting research”.