Chester County has this amazing history. A lot of it unsung and unrecorded. some of it is just by bits and pieces.
Such is the case of Hayti and Passtown…outside Coatesville.
A friend who used to do missionary work and nonprofit work in Haiti sent me two articles of Hayti in Coatesville. They are from the Daily Local, December 1986. They were written by Douglas Harper and I’m sharing them both in their entirety.
This is the kind of wonderful history that no newspaper does anymore, or if they do so it’s rare.
Before there was Hayti, there was Passtown.
Pasttown is the old name for the area along Lincoln Highway just west of Coatesville. It was also called hands pass, or simply the pass.
There is a narrow gap in the north Valley Hills here, and this past gave the place it’s early.
As for Hand’s Pass in the days when the Lancaster Turnpike was a toll road, the name was rumored to mean that travelers could gain free access to the highway here by giving a secret sign, made by a certain twisting of the hands.
But this was just wishful thinking by commuters. Hand’s Pass actually springs from the revolutionary war exploits of General Edward Hand of Lancaster.
A century ago, the battle that gave Hand’s Pass its name was told in much more glowing terms than today. Those were the days when patriotic pride was more important than historical veracity. Skirmishes and minor exchanges sometimes took on the aspect of major battles and glorious victories in the account of history writers . Such was the case with Hand’s Pass.
It was during the darkest days of the revolution. The American defeat on the Brandywine in September 1777 left Chester county open to the marauding British armies. According to the traditional account, General Hand and a small, but brave contingent of continental were prowling around the north Valley Hills. They encountered a detachment of Hessians, the hated mercenary forces of the British army. The Hessians had been out pillaging local farmers, but when they met with hand, he drove them back and took possession of the strategically important pass.
The revised version is somewhat different. Actually, both the Hessions and Hand’s continentals were out foraging from local farms – a practice, both sides employed during the war. When the two groups of hungry soldiers met, it is unknown who retreated faster. Only Hand and his men returned to the gap and camped there . The Hessians didn’t. Thus it was accounted an American victory. No one was killed in the battle, or even wounded. Neither side fired a shot.
Hand went on to a later distinguished political career in Lancaster County. His mansion still stands south of Lancaster. The Hession’s probably went on to fight for the British and other colonial wars, or whatever conflicts their prince leased them out to.
The name Hand’s Pass stuck for the gap, however. At the pass, or nearby, was a cave called Indian cave, which was rumored to be haunted in the late 1800s.
Earlier the cave had been the reputed hiding place of the notorious highwayman “Captain Fitz. “ James Fitzpatrick was a deserter from the Continental army in 1778. He earned the reputation as a local Robin Hood robbing the rich and sharing spoils with the poor.
He was eventually caught and hanged, but Bayard Taylor immortalized Captain Fitz as “Sandi flash“ in “the story of Kennett,“ and his career was one of the most colorful incidents in Chester county history.
In the last century, the past school stood across the road from a famous spring of clear, cold water. The waters of the Brooke that ran down to the Brandywine from the spring, refreshed generations of travelers, teamsters, school, children, horses, and tramps that passed through past town When Hayti first developed as a settlement of poor migrant workers, the spring was the sole source of water for the town. Both the spring and Indian cave disappeared under the expansion and relocation of Route 30 about 50 years ago.
In the approximate center of Valley Township on Lincoln Highway is the village of Hayti.
Hayti, pronounced “hay-tie”, is a busy, neat Coatesville suburb of about 1000 people overlooking the Chester Valley. But Hayti has different roots than most Chester county villages. The first inhabitants of Hayti weren’t scotch/Irish farmers or Quaker store and in keepers: they were immigrant millworkers from the Caribbean.
Valley Township was born in 1852. It already had two ironworks, and was near several more. The huge Brandywine Mills of Coatesville, later Lukens Steel, also had facilities in Valley. Most of Valley was farmland at the time, but the need for a permanent labor force for the mills soon changed the complexion of the Township.
Work in the mills was back, breaking and dangerous, even by pre-labor law standards. Mail jobs were undesirable to men who could find work elsewhere. Employment at the mills was sporadic. When there was work, the mills ran night and day for several weeks at a time. When orders dried up, they stood idle for whole summers, their employees out of work. From an early day, millwork devolved to immigrant workers.
According to tradition, sometime after the Civil War, a group of Haitians from the Caribbean island of Haiti came to Chester county and worked in the local Steel Mills near Coatesville. Perhaps they arrived one by one, perhaps they came as a group. Perhaps they were lowered there by company recruiters.
A little row of houses was erected for them on a street off of Lincoln Highway. On 1883 maps Hayti appears as an unnamed community of about 10 homes on the south side of Hayti Street now Front Street.
Local residence identified the village by the nationality of its inhabitants, and the pronunciation, and later the spelling of Haiti changed to suit the local tongue.
Hayti was one of several such company towns west of Coatesville in the age of Steele. Rock Run, Cat Swamp, Siberia, and Newlinville were names of others, many of which still stand. Mostly they were shabby patches of row homes, often without running water, rented by a series of poor tenants who stayed a few years and moved on.
“The story about Haitians is the one I’ve always heard, but historically I cannot confirm or deny it,” said Eugene DiOrio chairman of the Coatesville historical commission .
“I know that Lukens did recruit around the country, especially at the time of the first world war, when of course, there was a great demand for steel. Whether they ever recruited outside of the country, I’m not aware of,” DiOrio said. The Haitians were possibly in America already before removing to the Coatesville area.
“These things sometimes happened in the history of American immigration,” DiOrio said. “There are Jillians of good stories about how people got here.“
The story of the Haitians of Hayti is almost entirely forgotten. Details of their lives are difficult to glean today. Newspapers of the day, rarely mentioned immigrants or blacks, except an accounts of horse, thievery or revival meetings. But there are strong hints that these towns lived and died with the economy. When Steele thrived, times were good. When work fell off, people defended for themselves.
a correspondent in a newspaper of the 1880s reported on the changes brought to Rock Run by a change in prosperity: “dilapidated houses and hungry looking dogs met the eye at every return. Now comfortable houses and well clad children are the happy scenes that greet the eye.“
In another newspaper article, dated 1893, farmers and still rural Valley Township reported being “annoyed“ by petty pilfering of corn and grain, and by people who even broke into barns and milked the cows in their stalls.
“It is supposed,” the article continued, “that the mischief is done by some persons of the neighborhood, who, being thrown out of employment, are obliged to steal to secure a living.”
As late as 1920, most of the houses of Hayti were still occupied by black families, but the Haitians had either died or moved on. New developments sprang up in the Hayti area in the prosperity of World War I.
Russell Hill, a development south of Hayti, was nipped in the bud when route 30 was relocated through the middle of it. Lincoln Heights, as laid out in 1917, also faltered, but not before adding three new streets – Main, Lafayette and George– to Hayti . Meadowbrook was laid out in 1918.
In the days when horses took the place of cars and trucks as the principal means of transportation, disposing of dead animals was an urban problem. Just as junk cars are towed to scrap heaps today, dead horses, cows, and other animals were dragged to the edge of Coatesville, and left to rot in a field, just south of Hayti known as Horse Heaven.
Horse Heaven was a paradise for buzzards, crows, possums, and rats. It was also a source of income for small boys, who picked through the gruesome carcasses and gathered bones, which they sold for a few pennies to a nearby phosphate mill, the Charles E Cook bone mill.
An even older name for the Hayti area, and one that is now almost forgotten is Rainbow. One of the first settlers there, even before the Lancaster Turnpike was laid through, called his plantation rainbow farm. Later, the farmhouse became a tavern for the traffic on the turnpike.
This in, and a newer one that was replaced in around 1800, was called Rainbow Inn. The inn which later became a private home, was said to be haunted by the ghost of a man who was shot in a barroom brawl there a century or more ago.
Though the Rainbow Inn was already out of business by the turn of the century, when the Valley Township school board built a new one room school house to handle the growing population of Haiti they called the place Rainbow School.
Until 1957, under a defective system of segregation, the white children of Hayti attended rainbow school, while black students went to the Pass School. In 1957, Valley, integrated it schools under orders from the state Department of Public Education.
In 1929, the old Rainbow School was sold and a new one opened, and some school board members wanted to change the name to James A. Long school. The old Rainbow Inn had already passed from memory for most people.
But Rainbow survived the attempt, and Rainbow school remains one of the elementary schools in the Coatesville Area School District.
The Pass School has had a number of homes since it first opened as a private academy in 1800. Its first home was a log cabin, with a crude blackboard on one wall and a row of split logs for seats. Schooling grew more sophisticated over the years, but even as late as 1893 the Pass School had to stay closed one Monday because the teacher forgot to bring her key. Through the late 19th century Coatesville children who lived west of the Brandywine attended the Pass School, and the shade of an ancient oak tree, and beside a clear spring.
Anyway, there was a historical society website for Hayti and it’s under construction again so you can’t read about it . I have gathered some snippets of articles I have found and am including them because how can Chester County be doing the 250th of this country without including history like this? Or of Mount Pleasant in Tredyffrin?
Here’s hoping the Chester County History Center shows some initiative here.
