A while ago I screen shot a Legal Intellegencer article that came up on a Google Cache:
Read the article. It is a cautionary tale of land shark developers and politicians and local zoning and the Municipalities Planning Code or the MPC. You know that giant body of code that steers our local zoning in PA?
Embreeville was on my blog in 2013 because of the connection to the then Chester County SPCA. I noted then that West Bradford has a page dedicated to the hot mess that is this development.
Well people are waking up about Embreeville again because it is in the news again. A huge development which will directly impact schools, roads, and quality of life.
I last paid attention to this in 2014:
Embreeville developers argue against ordinance change
West Bradford >> Developers with housing plans at the former Embreeville State Hospital property challenged a recent change to a township zoning ordinance, arguing the township is not meeting its “fair share obligations” for regional growth.
“Fair share obligations”? Wow who knew you HAD to have development? I guess the screen shot from the Legal Intellegencer above from March 2016 is the end result of this?
So I had heard there was supposed to be a hearing June 22, but then it was postponed. The most incredulous thing to me is this will be a hearing where it sounds like the public can’t speak?
Public hearing is Aug. 3 for plan to build 1,100 homes and apartments in Embreeville
Yet like most tragically bad development plans it is back again.
It is too big and too dense.
Why does everything proposed in Chester County have to be an open space killer ?
And what would happen to where Indian Hannah is?
Indian Hannah (Mrs. Hannah Freeman) (1730–1802) was the last of the Lenni-Lenape Indians (or Delawares) in Chester County, Pennsylvania, USA.[1][2][3]
She was born around 1730 in southern Chester County. She moved about the region, at times living in New Jersey, perhaps having a common law Indian husband named Andrew Freeman. She was known throughout the region, wandering with her two dogs Elmun and Putmoe selling brooms and woven baskets. In her later years she lived in the newly constructed Chester County Poorhouse where she died and was the first to be buried in its graveyard.
A road is named after her (“Indian Hannah Road”) in Newlin Township, Pennsylvania, and there are two memorial markers for her in Chester County, near Embreeville, Pennsylvania.
Indian Hannah has been written about a great deal. The Inquirer wrote about her in 1989. Her history is fascinating, how would this development affect her memory? If her grave-site is on Embreeville property, then what? And have Indian and other artifacts been found here? Properly cared for? Documented? And I am confused about whatever actually happened to that 20 acres the SPCA had? Or didn’t they actually ever get the land?
Ok look, everyone knows that kind of a chunk of land will not go undeveloped, but why should this proposed development be allowed to ruin a part of Chester County?
Here are a couple of comments I have seen on social media:
With thousands of additional cars each morning, you can certainly plan on seeing quaint Marshalton installing a few traffic lights soon. As it is now cars back up a half mile each morning at the intersection of Strasburg and Telegraph, these developments and the extra traffic will a nightmare. I’m going to post a video soon of what Broad Run Rd looks like each day as people try to bypass the traffic and rush up the dirt road one after another to try and avoid the line on Strasburg. If the police want to make some money with speeding tickets they could make a years quota in 2 or 3 days. And this is BEFORE the developments have gone in.
And:
This tract is very near the Natural Lands’ Cheslen preserve. I’m very disappointed in West Bradford….More suburbia in the last undeveloped area of Chester County, in West Bradford and parts north of Unionville?
Why is that they feel it’s acceptable to pack houses in a region just because its right next door to a preserve. Is this the vision of the Chester County comprehensive plan: create as many high density housing developments as possible but link them together with a few small open space areas, “passive” parks, recreational areas and exercise trails. So what if we no longer have working farms or authentic rural areas – we have a “planned” community of Chester County. You’ve heard of gentrification? Well this will be the organized suburbs.
Here is a great article on the area, written by a friend of mine for The Hunt Magazine:
Chester County’s Poorhouse
A place to go for the poverty-stricken in the 19th century.
As early as 1800, the poverty-stricken in Chester County had a place in the community. They lived at its Poorhouse, built on a 350–acre tract that was considered one of the most scenic regions of the county. In recent years, the grounds were known as the State Police Barracks at Embreeville and are now in the news for being part of a contested proposed high-density development.
The original building—a stately three-story brick structure with dormer windows—stood on a hilltop overlooking the West Branch of the Brandywine. From a distance, it resembled any other profitable farmstead of the region, with dairy cows and outbuildings. For the poor, this was no ordinary farm, of course. It served as an orphanage, a homeless shelter, a battered women’s refuge, a lying-in hospital, a nursing home and an asylum….For the most part, the Chester County Poorhouse was built in 1800 as a working farm. It was no Dickensian debtors’ prison. It had central heating and a steam laundry. Water was piped in from a nearby spring, and the kitchen was equipped with a professional-grade range and coffee boiler. Children of a certain age had their own dining room and, later, a school.
That first year, Hannah Freeman—aka “Indian Hannah”—appears on the books as one of only two nonwhite “inmates.” She and “Black Phyllis” were allowed to live, without segregation (that came later), among the other women in a dormitory-style room equipped with 27 cots but only 16 sets of sheets, as the “Visitors”—a group of men selected to tour the facilities—later reported.
On Nov. 12, 1800, when Freeman entered the Poorhouse at age 69, she was celebrated as a native Lenape Indian who lived alone with her two dogs in a series of “rude” huts. She had been under the care of a group of Quaker farmers, who signed a formal agreement for her financial support.
Freeman was later immortalized in the 1909 poem “The Last of Her Race.” In her lifetime, she became somewhat of a celebrity in Chester County. Yet only one other entry is found on the book—and that’s her 1802 death, the first in the institution, and her burial in the “almshouse graveyard.”
Anyway, I haven’t a clue as to how to stop this development any more than how people will stop whatever eventually happens at Bryn Coed in West Vincent and whichever other township has some of that estate in it but wow, we have to do something about development, right?
Chester County needs a citizen driven county-wide initiative to slow down, and in some cases stop development. Chester County residents need to take back their county. When the open space is gone, it’s not coming back. When the farms are gone, they won’t be producing food. And all of these developments impact our way of life and our taxes and schools. Municipalities get the quickie high of one time ratables and the burden goes to the taxpayers forever after, correct?
Every resident of Chester County needs to remember these horrible development plans every time there is the opportunity to vote in the most local of elections right through to Harrisburg. Use your power of your vote to enact change. But in the mean time, support the folks immediately impacted by a development on what was Embreeville State Hospital.
Contact Andy Dinniman’s office. He’s the state senator. As for State Rep, contact your State Rep and tell them this is a BAD PLAN to enact on formerly(?) state owned land. And that is something I wonder: who owns the land? Is it the developer now? Or is it still the state pending the outcome of these hearings?
#ChesterCountyWakeUp
#SlowDownChesterCountyPADevelopment
http://www.marshalltonconservationtrust.org/news/embreeville/
