When Pennsylvania settlers ventured into Thornbury Township in the 1680s, the land was not heavily forested because the Lenni Lenape had removed many trees on ridges and near streams to improve hunting for buffalo and deer and had created many clearings to cultivate corn and beans. After the natives left, the forests grew thicker until eighteenth-century farmers aggressively cleared them. Thornbury grew slowly throughout the eighteenth century, and at the close of the War for Independence only 52 farms stood in the undivided township. Squire Cheyney's farmstead included meadows for grazing, fields for crops, and woodlands partly used as a fuel source. After his death, his son and grandson, like most Chester County farmers, shifted to dairy products, specializing first in cheese and after 1850 in butter, a change that required an addition to the springhouse to preserve products for market. The family also raised wheat as a cash crop, requiring a steady expansion of the barn. The barn continued to grow after Thomas Dallett bought the farmstead in 1875, and Dallett descendants lived there until the turn of the twenty-first century. The farm's landscape changed little throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth; although farm structures increased in number, land use remained fundamentally the same. This park and the adjacent buildings are all that remain of the Squire Cheyney farmstead, preserved as open space for public enjoyment. The farmstead's listing on the National Register of Historic Places protects it from arbitrary destruction by public projects, while a preservation easement protects the privately owned Squire Cheyney house and barn from neglect and historically damaging changes, and the Township-owned springhouse has been preserved to interpret Thornbury's agricultural heritage.