Morrisville Real Estate
Bucks County, PA
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Short History of Morrisville |
The site of the present-day Borough of Morrisville has been a strategic location since prehistoric times, being at the head of tide in the Delaware River the demarcation between deep and shallow water. It was a favorite haunt of the Lenni Lenape Indians before the first settlers arrived from Europe and a small group of trappers established a settlement at the falls in 1624. A Swedish writer recorded in 1643 that the area abounded with "deer, turkies [sic], walnuts, chestnuts, peaches, mulberries, plums, grapes, hemp, hops, pumpkins and rattlesnakes."
A point at the intersection of Crown Street and Highland Avenue, called "Graystones" because of an outcropping of large gray boulders, served as the starting point of the first purchase of land from the Indians by William Penn in 1682. The purchase included all land between the Delaware River and Neshaminy Creek south of a line drawn from the river at a point near the mouth of Knowles Creek, nine miles north of Graystones, to Neshaminy Creek. The line between Knowles and Neshaminy Creeks later became the starting point for the "walking purchase" of 1737.
Morrisville's location on the overland route between the burgeoning seaports of Philadelphia and New York was an additional advantage. In 1772, Patrick Colvin began to operate a ferry across the Delaware River, and the Hoops family built a grist mill at the falls. The settlement at the falls, then known as Colvin's Ferry, became a thriving mercantile center, with nearly a dozen mills manufacturing iron and wooden materials for shipbuilding and other industries. The town was later renamed Morrisville in honor of Robert Morris, best remembered as the financier of the American Revolution, who owned some 2,500 acres in the area.
While a senator, Morris had proposed that the newly-formed United States government select the banks of the falls of the Delaware for the fledgling nation's capital. Although Congress voted in favor of the proposal, no action was taken at the time. In a subsequent political compromise, northerners led by Alexander Hamilton of New York relinquished the Morrisville site in a trade-off for establishing a national bank, while southerners, led by the Virginia Congressional delegation, won the selection of the Potomac River capital site where Washington, D.C., now stands.
Morris, who had made extensive speculative purchases of local property largely on borrowed money starting in 1789, ended his career in bankruptcy in 1797 when his proposal of Morrisville as the nation's capital failed to materialize. He was incarcerated in debtor's prison for over three years and died in 1806.
Text from brocure titled "Summerseat, Home of Patriots," published by the Historic Morrisville Society.
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