Tag: Whiskey Rebellion

  • Oliver Miller Homestead, South Park

    Old Stone Manse

    Oliver Miller was one of the early settlers by most standards: he moved here in 1772. Nevertheless, he was not the first European settler on this site: a certain Silas Deckster or Dackster or Daxter (or some similar spelling: names were often spelled several different ways out here on the frontier) had owned the land before him.1

    The Miller family are famous for having more or less provoked the Whiskey Rebellion, which broke out into open hostility when the federal marshal showed up at the nearby home of Oliver’s son William in 1794 (Oliver had died in 1782) to serve a writ for failing to pay the whiskey tax.

    Old Stone Manse

    The Old Stone Manse we see today had not yet been built by the time of the Whiskey Rebellion: it was built by Oliver’s son James, who inherited the property. A log house stood here in Oliver’s time. In the late 1700s, a stone kitchen was added in the back. Then, in 1808, the smaller stone section we see here on the right side of the house was added. Finally, in 1830, the old log house was replaced with the larger stone main house—the section in the picture below.

    Later section of the house
    James Miller House
    Old Stone Manse
    Rear of the house

    Although the house was never really designed—it just occurred over a number of decades—it nevertheless makes a pleasing sight. We are reminded of what Charles Stotz, our pioneer preservationist, wrote about these early unpretentious farmhouses: “Their quiet lines and excellent mass are wholly satisfying. It seems that in the essential qualities of architectural design their builders, curiously enough, were capable of doing no wrong; and instinctive good taste is demonstrated in the thoughtful choice of site and the placing of the building with relationship to its surroundings.”2 Stotz described this house in particular as “one of the best preserved examples of indigenous domestic architecture.”3

    James Miller House
    Springhouse

    The springhouse is older than the main house, and may even have been built by Mr. Deckster before Oliver Miller bought the land. We are told by Wikipedia’s sparsely sourced article that a date stone was recently found with a date that some people read as 1765, but others as 1785.

    Reconstructed log house

    A log house on the grounds is easier to date: a date stone near the top of the chimney clearly reads “1988.” The timbers and stones are a little too neatly cut for an eighteenth-century house, but it does give us a good idea of what a log house of pioneer days was like.

    Log house
    Barn

    A Pennsylvania bank barn is also on the grounds. Bank barns are built on slopes to give two floors ground-level access, which makes storing hay and keeping animals much more efficient. Imagine having to carry your cows upstairs every time you wanted to put them away.

    Barn
    Barn
    Olympus E-20N; Canon PowerShot SX150 IS.

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  • Old St. Luke’s

    Father Pitt is especially fond of Old St. Luke’s, partly for its history (its congregation was at the center of the Whiskey Rebellion), but mostly for its situation in a picturesque country churchyard.

  • Woodville Plantation

    Under layers of later accretions is a Revolution-era house that belonged to the Neville family. When General Neville, an old Washington crony, was appointed collector of the Washington administration’s very unpopular whiskey tax in 1794, the Whiskey Rebellion broke out: rioters burned Bower Hill, General Neville’s home, and he fled for his life to this house, which belonged to his son.

    This was a southern gentleman’s house: the Nevilles were from Virginia, and settled here in Yohogania County when Virginia claimed this part of the world. They kept slaves in the 1700s; Pennsylvania abolished slavery in stages.

    The house has been lovingly restored and is now a museum open Sunday afternoons. Inside, among many treasures, is an original 1815 Clementi pianoforte, bought for the house in 2006.