Warwick Township
Warwick Furnaces
Samuel Nutt began his career making iron at Coventry Forge in South Coventry. After Samuel Nutt passed away in 1737, his wife Ann and nephew, Samuel Nutt, Jr., took over the forge, and according to Samuel's will, he allowed them to erect a new furnace that at Warwick. They continued to partner with William Branson until he built a second furnace in Warwick Township. When Samuel Jr. died in 1739, his wife Rebecca took over the furnace and married Robert Grace, a friend and ally of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a frequent guest at the forges and in the early 1740s he devised a 'stove' which would allow warm air to circulate inside the fireplace before traveling up the chimney. The stove was made of iron cast at Redding Furnace. In 1745 John Potts was the iron master. He hired an indentured servant from Ireland George Taylor to function as clerk. Taylor became a signer of the Declaration of Independence. When a widower himself and after the death of his friend Robert Grace, Franklin sought to marry Rebecca but she turned him down.
During the American Revolution, the advance of the British into Chester County in mid September 1777 prompted removal of supplies stored at Warwick.
St. Peter's Village
"Where Marshallton, a village just outside West Chester is principally of stone construction completed before 1840, St. Peters is a wooden town erected next to an iron mine first excavated in 1845. The mine was later converted to extract diabase, a stone better known as black granite. The quarry operations ceased in the 1970s and the village has undergone a series of efforts to make it into a tourist attraction... St. Peter’s Village and Knauertown on Route 23 were essentially owned by the Knauer family until World War II."
- Mark Ashton, Chester County: A Modern History
Bibliography
"An Incomplete History of Warwick Furnace & The Farm." Warwick Furnace Farm. Accessed July 15, 2025. https://www.warwickfurnacefarm.com/farmhistory.
Futhey, John Smith and Gilbert Cope. History of Chester County, Pennsylvania: With Genealogical and Biographical Sketches. (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1881): 344-346.