|
(Adapted
by Faye R. Doyle 2006 from More Forgotten Streets, by Louis Ficcio,
1956)
It t was
an Indian path before the white man walked it. It became a cart-way; a road; a
street. Such is the brief
history ofOxford’s first named main artery. It was called the Limestone Road.
William Penn surveyed the Nottingham Lots, in 1702. Soon they were settled with farms,
houses, and barns. The Nottingham
farmers, needing limestone for their fields, found they could get it in large
quantities in the Great Valley north of Oxford.
Horses and oxen traveling through Oxford, dragging heavy carts and wagons,
widened the path into the Limestone Road.
Today’s map names it Third Street.
Witmer’s 1872 map marked it Central Avenue.
Tanner’s Road, shown on an early hand-drawn road petition, turns out
to be Market
Street. It led directly to Phillip Tanner’s mill on
the Little Elk creek. With the rise
of New London as
an important cross-roads village, it became the New London
Road.
Borough Council referred to it as Market
Street long before Witmer dubbed it
Delaware Avenue.
Sanborn, another cartographer, has Delaware Avenue where Maryland Avenue is
now.
Witmer,
whose name will occur many times in telling the story of Oxford’s Streets, was an indefatigable mapster from
Lancaster, Pa.
His work consists mostly of county maps in book form, with separate large
scale plans of the more important towns and cities. They were published in the 1870’s.
Fifth
Street was next to have a
name. About 1796, the good citizens
petitioned the county court to establish a connecting road with one coming north
from Elkton, MD past the Blue Ball Tavern, to the state
line, ending near “the widow Hood’s Tavern at or near a private road called
Thompson’s Road.” Called the
Elkton
Road [before it was Fifth
St,] it was
the popular way to get to Elkton, and may still be the shortest distance.
County
road papers disclose an address to the court asking that a road be laid out from
what is now Holmes’ Bridge, “ending in the village of Oxford near the new stone school
house.” The year was 1798. That is the first reference to education
for Oxford. The “new stone school house” would be
near the “Old
Masonic Building”, for that is where the road
ended. I have found no other reference to this school house. The non-conforming
Witmer named it Lancaster Avenue.
Long after 1798 a borough council re-named it Pine
Street. Earlier it was called the Strasburg Road. The
name of Lancaster Ave was then given to the road opened across the
meadow from Mt. Vernon
St. to the corner of Coach and Pine Streets in
the1930’s.
Myrtle
Avenue is so identified on the 1872 map, yet council referred to it as Four and
a Half Street; and as such [4 ½ ] ordained an unnamed street, never opened, east
from it [Myrtle] to Fifth Street paralleling Market and Broad
Streets.
A
spectral street, appearing only in the minds of its planners and on the gullible
Mr. Witmer’s map, is another High Street.
This one, observed Witmer, lays in an easterly direction from Seventh Street to
Eighth Street, between Market and Broad. Council, in addition to High, termed it
variously as Mercer, Spear, and Church
Street. Now it functions as a
driveway for the medical clinic, and is paralleled by Holton Alley closer to
Market
St.
Nearby
Addison
Street was named for its developer, Addison Long, who
at one time owned nearly the entire block.
Borough
solons dignified Coal Alley by extending it and naming it Coal
Street. Investigation reveals it as today’s
Commerce Street.
Perhaps
no more than a dozen Oxfordians could locate Menough
Street. It is as much a street today as when
Sanborn placed it on his block maps of 1900 and 1915. No houses were on it then and no houses
are on it now. It has been demoted to alley status, and is two blocks long,
originating on Market Street and ending on Hodgson
Street near
the school. It was named for the 2 Menough Brothers who built large brick houses
on either side of its entrance off Market St.
Incidentally, Hodgson Street was named for the once prominent Hodgson
family. They built the house on the
SE corner of Fourth and Hodgson and lived there. Hodgson
Street was
once called Freight
Street.
Witmer
has Valley
Avenue,
Summit Avenue, and Octoraro Avenue all
starting from Third Street and going westward, toward the borough storage
barn. At one time you could get
through to the Hopewell
Road, also called Western
Ave (now Locust
Street) from
Valley. Much of Valley is on or beside the old Peachie RR right-of-way. Within
the last 100 years Summit
Avenue has crept about three blocks west toward its
current destination of Virginia Ave.
Sanborn on his two maps calls it Ridge Avenue. Octoraro Avenue, which was to roughly
parallel Locust Street, became the continuation of Hodgson St. from
Third to Locust. One deed for a
property has for its description, “on the corner of Penn
Avenue and
Octoraro
Avenue”. Now the alley between the Octoraro Hotel and
the Presbyterian Church is called Octoraro Alley but has no street signs. This
alley has also been termed Market, as it is a continuation of that street.
The
1900 Sanborn map labels Penn Ave. and its off-set northern extension [now Western
Terrace] as 1st St.
Who
knows where Marshall Street was?
I didn’t until it was brought to my attention a few days ago. Depicted on a hand drawn chart, since
destroyed, used by the Electric Company and hanging in their office some seventy
or eighty years ago; it termed the quarter mile part of Reisler Road off Fifth
St. as Marshall Street. Of course,
Reisler
Rd. has been renamed Wickersham Rd. Whatever the
significance of Marshall was as a street name has long since
been forgotten.
Alison
F. Wheeler wintered his circus at Oxford at the Fair Grounds, prompting the name
Wheeler Boulevard for the street that was put through when
the Fairgrounds closed. Park
Street bordered the south side of the fair
grounds.
The
most recently named streets are Oak Alley and Cemetery Alley. Oak Street, so
named because of the abundant oaks in the area, including our Penn Oak on the
green, was renamed North
4th
St., and later the alley paralleling
it became Oak Alley. The alley from Maple Street to the Green, exiting onto
Third St. led to the cemetery on the green from which many
graves were moved north to the present Oxford Cemetery.
Village
street names reflect their functions, the names of prominent citizens, their
geography and order of placement, their destination or surrounding geography,
the historical origins of early citizens, and prior native occupants. See if you
can find examples of these in the above facts. As the village grows and changes,
so do the street names.
If you have ideas for historical briefs about Oxford, please email us and let us know.
|
