The following information about this historic house can be found on the
Old Chester website:
The Caleb Pusey House is the oldest continuously standing house in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was built in 1683 and last occupied in 1950. Its story is in many ways the story of southeastern Pennsylvania. Caleb Pusey (his real last name was Bartholomew) was a lastmaker (a person who makes wooden foot molds for cobblers) in England, a Quaker, and a close friend of William Penn.
After Penn acquired his holdings in Pennsylvania, he had his land divided into parcels to be sold to the First Purchasers. These were Quakers and other Protestants from England, France, and Holland, who
wanted to escape old Europe and start over in the New World. Penn realized that his First Purchasers would need to have lumber and a grist mill to grind their grain. He asked his friend, Caleb Pusey, to construct and run such a mill on the Landingford Plantation in what is now Upland along the Chester Creek. A prefabricated mill was loaded as ballast in the hull of the ship Welcome, bound for landing at Marcus Hook. Pusey, his wife Anne Worley, and their two daughters by her first marriage, sailed on the Welcome, and upon landing trucked the mill through the woods to the Landingford Plantation in the Fall of 1682. With winter coming on, the Puseys dug a pit house on their plot, and lived there the first winter (Anne lost the child she was carrying). In the Spring of 1683, Caleb built the first part of the house that still bears his name.
Pusey built and operated the mills (the first was swept away in a flood) in the Enlightenment community of Landingford Plantation until 1717, when he moved with his family, who would include a daughter who was the fore bearer of the artist Maxwell Parish, to East Marlborough Township. Pusey was the first magistrate of Delaware County and a jack-of-all-trades in these earliest days.
The house and mills changed hands a number of times after Pusey left, the longest period (1792-1845) by Flower family. In 1845, they sold the mill and lands to John Price Crozer, one of the industrial barons of the Christian Revitalist movement. Crozer saw Pusey's house as a symbol of the beginning of industry in America. He therefore built a wall around the house and installed the African-American midwife of the community, Mother Jones (nor the famous one), whose family lived in it for the next 60 years. Crozer built his weaving mill around the bend of the Chester Creek to produce a famous blue woolen cloth, which he sold to his great profit, to the Union Army in the Civil War. He also built the First Baptist Church of Upland, a schoolhouse to teach the children of his mill workers to read the Bible and much of the housing stock of Upland.
The house passed through many hands after the Crozers left Upland. In the 1950's, a group of Quaker women lead by Josephine Albrecht, began a project to strip away the house's many remodelings, so that it would come as close as possible to the original. In the process, she and neighbor people (unfortunately without the advice of a professional archaeologist) excavated one million artifacts, mostly of the Revolutionary Period, which are stored on the second floor of the Crozer Schoolhouse.
Tours of the house are available on weekends through the Friends of the Caleb Pusey House, Inc.
The following additional information about this historic house can be found on the Caleb Pusey House and Landingford Plantation website:
Built in 1683 and occupied by Caleb Pusey, this is the only building still standing which can claim documented association with the Proprietor, William Penn, and which he is known to have visited on several occasions. This unique English Vernacular house stands beside Race Street, the small road once paralleling the millrace that brought water from Chester Creek to power the mills.
"Landing Ford" was the name Pusey gave to the 100 - acre plantation adjoining the mill site which Penn had deeded to him and which he cultivated to raise food for his large family.
Pusey had come to Pennsylvania in 1682 to serve Penn as manager and agent for the Chester Mills, the first official Proprietary saw and grist mill to be established by Penn in the colony.