In the eighteenth century, the local Scotch-Irish kept more records of financial matters than of daily life, so few contemporary descriptions of the area survive. In his second edition of The History of Bucks County (1905), W.W.H. Davis described the Moland House as the farmhouse of the recently deceased John Moland, a substantial stone dwelling in good preservation, with the first floor divided into two rooms and an entry near the kitchen; the smaller rear room is thought to have been used by George Washington as an office and the larger room as a reception room, and both had open fireplaces and doors into the kitchen. Historian William J. Buck, writing in the first article published on the Neshaminy Encampment, called it the best finished house in the neighborhood at the time of the Revolution. In the late colonial period, from 1750 to 1780, the average family farm in settled rural areas covered one hundred twenty-five acres, with three acres containing the house, barn, and other outbuildings, forty-four percent of the remaining land in plowed fields, meadows, and orchards, sixteen percent in pasture, and forty percent in woodlots; in Bucks County, seventy-five percent of farmsteads were above fifty acres, the minimum considered sufficient to sustain a family. The April 1761 inventory of John Moland’s estate offers insight into his farm, listing slaves, cattle, and farm implements that suggest active farming, four spinning wheels that suggest flax growing or sheep herding or both, and a still that suggests the making of distilled spirits. The small well house built in 1850 southeast of the Moland House has an unusual cove-shaped roofline and was probably used for food preparation and canning, with wall shelves, a rear stove chimney, and a ladder to a loft; its well was protected by a roof open on two sides and supported by a stone wall extension, while the basement, reached through a large padlocked door, served as a root cellar with a vaulted stone ceiling and ventilation shafts under the eaves that helped keep food from spoiling.

Photo: Don Morfe

Photo: Don Morfe

Photo: Don Morfe

Photo: Don Morfe

Photo: Don Morfe

Warminster, Pennsylvania · USA