The Quick and the Daft

Our listing at 100 S. Lansdowne Ave. is an old house.  No one seems to be sure exactly how old, some have said 1840s, others say 1860s.  Researching the age of the property like this through deeds doesn't work for one reason: subdivision.  This house, like most this age, used to sit on a much larger parcel of land.  Over the years the property was subdivided in to smaller parcels resulting in the current lot size sometime around 1892.  Generally, deeds only reference the property boundaries with no mention of any house, so looking at deeds for this house before the last subdivision will not tell us if there was a house on the land.  An easier way to determine age is through the use of old real estate atlases.  Upper Darby Township atlases from 1875 & 1882 both show the house standing on the Pennock estate, along with the house at the end of Violet Lane.  It does not appear on an earlier atlas from 1870, but that map is a larger scale, so it's possible the house was too small to be included.  So, using the maps, we can safely say the house was built in the 1870s; it may be older, but we can only prove it was standing in 1875.

 1875

 1882