A sense of this place
"A history of Innisfree in Milanville" must begin with a grounding in its physical landscape. The water and countryside here are the ancestral land and waters of numerous Native tribes, including the Lenape, Susquehannock, and Mohican [link], or Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee-Ga : or the territories of the People of the Long House [link] According to oral history, five nations banded together over 1,000 years ago to form a union. The five nations were the Mohawk, Cayuga, Seneca, Oneida and Onondaga. (In 1722, the Tuscarora joined the union making the confederacy Six Nations.)
The Iroquois, also known as the Five Nations or the Six Nations and by the endonym Haudenosaunee; meaning "people who are building the longhouse"), are an Iroquoian-speaking confederacy of First Nations peoples now called northeast North America and Upstate New York. They were known during the colonial years to the French as the "Iroquois League", and later as the "Iroquois Confederacy". The English called them the "Five Nations", including (east to west) the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. After 1722, the Iroquoian-speaking Tuscarora from the southeast were accepted into the confederacy, which became known as the Six Nations. The Confederacy likely came about between the years 1450 CE and 1660 CE as a result of the Great Law of Peace. [link] [link] [link]
As European immigrants flooded the American continent, Great Britain exercised its colonial might, an English Quaker leader and advocate of religious freedom and abolishing slavery named William Penn oversaw the founding of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as a refuge for Quakers and other religious minorities of Europe. After much bloodshed and decimation of their numbers, native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral home here as their survivors moved westward to places like Kansas while some lived more locally in small closed enclaves like the Ramapo Munsee Nation and the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania.
Named for Milan, Italy (but bearing little or no resemblance to that city and pronounced today with a long "i"), Milanville was settled in the 19th century as a logging community due to its proximity to the Skinners Falls and the confluence of the Calkins Creek, at a time when the local economy centered around the logging and tanning industries of by-gone days. Local historians say Milanville was once home to multiple mills of varying types, in addition to other bustling agrarian and mercantile industry of which very few traces remain. The oldest house in Wayne County, said to have been built by pioneer John Land in 1796, stands on River Road roughly a mile upriver from the Skinners Falls bridge, between Milanville and Damascus, near the original site of a colonial fort whose replica now stands in Narrowsburg known as Fort Delaware. Milanville is a small unincorporated rural hamlet consisting of homes and a general store. Massive quantities of timber, in the form of rafts and loose logs, were floated downriver to Trenton and Philadelphia for milling. Milanville itself also had several mills on the river along Calkins Creek.
The 1902 Skinners Falls Bridge, which at this writing (2024) has been closed for five years, is significant to the community and the Upper Delaware Region. The bridge itself is on the National Register of Historic Places and contributed to the designation of the Milanville Historic District (in Pennsylvania). The hamlet is in the river corridor of the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River, a unit of the United States National Park Service (NPS). During the years that this bridge was closed in the late 1980s, I advocated to repair and reopen the bridge quickly. Recent studies have indicated that the bridge can still be preserved.
"BEGINNING at a large rock in the Delaware River..."
Thus begin the metes and bounds section of a deed to the land on which the 1920 US Census lists George B. Knapp and Phoebe J. Knapp, aged 57 and 59, residing at the Milanville property, along with their unmarried daughter, Hattie Branning, 28, and their nephew and two nieces, ages 7, 4, and 3. Ten years earlier,
The Knapp family seems to have occupied the older farmhouse that preceded the present “main house” on the Innisfree property. That farmhouse would eventually be dismantled and re-used as the building known as the annex in Hillside Acres days, or in Innisfree’s time the dormitory, which was destroyed in 1997.
On April 18, 1929, a local newspaper reported that G.B. Knapp of Honesdale sold a 47-acre Milanville property to Anthony J. ("A.J.") Thomas of New York City. (The seller may have been G.B. Knapp's estate rather than himself, as he died in 1923 and his wife Phoebe died in 1921.)
