Newtown Township, planned in England by William Penn in 1681 as the first inland town west of Philadelphia, developed from an early farming community that relied in the 1700s on saw mills for lumber and grist mills for flour, then added manufacturing mills in the 1800s, including woolen, tilt and blade, and paper mills. These mills were built on streams because water power operated them, with dams, mill ponds, mill races, and water wheels turning the machinery, and Newtown Township had Darby Creek, Crum Creek, and Fawkes Run to support them. Along Darby Creek, the earliest mill in Newtown was a saw mill erected by William Thomas in 1754 at the corner of Paper Mill Road and St. David's Road, with a dam at the present bridge on St. David's Road; the dam was moved upstream in the 1770s because of flooding, and the mill remained in operation until 1810, when its last owner was William Hayman, a captain in the Revolutionary Navy and Anthony Wayne's brother-in-law. After no activity there from 1810 to 1828, William Crosley bought the property and built a stone woolen mill in 1828, employing about 30 English men and women and using a mill workers' house that became the Paper Mill House Museum; at one time the house was 175 feet long and housed seven families. Hard times came to the woolen mill because of the Civil War and a depression, and in February 1861 it was suspiciously burned. In 1869, Mr. Casper Garrett built the Union Paper Mill on the same site, using the earlier watercourses and later also steam power to produce wallpaper from old rags carted from Wayne and Devon by horse-drawn wagons, but the mill closed in 1889 after smallpox carried by the rags spread among the workers and the machinery was sold to a firm in Brazil. About 400 yards downstream, John Brooke's tilt and blade mill, erected in 1796, made hand tools such as shovels and farm equipment and operated until at least 1811. The Paper Mill House, whose oldest section dates to about 1770, served as a residence for workers in the numerous local mills along Darby Creek; it was restored in the early 1980's, placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and stands on a 4.5 acre property owned by Newtown Township and jointly managed by the Historical Society and the Township.
