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West Chester: Home for Botanists and Gardeners

A little more history about Marshall Square Park

In the early 1900s, a remarkably vast territory surrounding what is today the Marshall Square Park was under cultivation. More than 600 acres alone was devoted to fruit trees and ornamental plants, while other areas in this quarter of the borough contained greenhouses and delivery roads leading from a nearby rail depot.

One well-known resident, David Townsend (1787-1858) had earned a widespread recognition as an amateur botanist, but his horticultural pursuits was only partly responsible for what one reporter described as the borough‘s “genial pleasures” in creating “comfortable residences, elaborately adorned with the choicest flowers and shrubbery.”

Much of the cultivated land belonged to Hoopes Bros. and Thomas, a commercial nursery established around 1860, a short walk from Townsend’s own gardens on N.Matlack Street.  By the time, Josiah Hoopes extended his nursery to include the land east of Franklin Street to what is now the grounds of the Chester County Hospital, his nursery was the largest of its kind in the nation.

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The railroad enabled Hoopes to ship mail-ordered fruit trees to nearly every state in the nation. The nursery also had a large business with the U.S. government, supplying small trees and shrubs for the newly established national cemeteries.  These plantings, along with the neat rows of peach, apple, pear, and cherry trees, can be seen in aerial views of the period. 

Prior to 1848, when Marshall Square Park was established by an ordinance, Hoopes permitted another nurseryman, Pascall Morris, to grow ornamental plants on the property. Hoopes, author of The Book of Evergreens (1869) also established a small arboretum in the park in 1878, using to grow experiment plantings that would often appear in the latest issue of The Horticulturist and Gardener’s Monthly, among the numerous magazines he wrote for.  He was also said to devise the main planting scheme, comprised of such rare trees as osage orange and “cucumber” tree, when he, Townsend and a prominent botanist named William Darlington, decided to open the grounds to the public.  

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It was auspicious time for opening a park, but even more remarkable when one considers that New York’s Central Park would not open for another nine years, then not formally designed (by Frederick Law Olmsted) until 1873. 

West Chester would soon become a major manufacturing town, and its Quaker residents may have sensed that they needed to create a respite for the area’s working class, not to mention the desire to follow William Penn’s ideal –  to retain a “Greene country” space within a residential environs.  

Townsend did not live to see the park become an official borough park, but he was behind its conception and wanted it to be named for another local plant collector, the colonial botanist Humphry Marshall (1722-1800).

Most of the trees in the park, in fact, were part of the “useful knowledge,” Marshall promoted in being the first American to publish, with an American press in 1785, what he described as “Natives of our United States.” (Part mail order catalogue and part list of native plants, the book was an immediate success overseas, especially with its inclusion of such oddities as the Venus flytrap, and the American varieties of flowering plants such as tulips and honeysuckle.

It is a good bet that Townsend himself also contributed to many of the park’s early plantings. While Hoopes had practical knowledge of planting, Townsend had a botanist’s understanding of plant origins. He grew up in a farm in northern Chester County and moved to West Chester in 1810 to work as clerk at the office of the Register of Wills.  He is remembered today for the house on Matlack Street that he purchased in 1835 and occupied after 1849, when illness forced him to retire as chief cashier of the National Bank of Chester County.

In a relativity short period of time, Townsend established himself as respected botanist. He planted a large “herbarium” on his property, and with his “habits of close observation,” as his obituary described it, he was soon sharing his insights of native plants with eminent botanists in England. His assistance in identifying native asters, for instance, led the director of Kew Gardens to name an entire genus in Townsend’s name. Perhaps most important to Townsend was the success of his book, Florula Cestrica, which documented all the flora he had discovered in Chester County. 

Following Darlington’s lead, Hoopes and Townsend were devoted to exploring what one reporter termed “every marsh, plain and rock” in the region and in the process helped local farmers realize invasive species such as the horse nettle and ox eyed daisy (the latter was considered so damaging to the local agriculture that in 1869, the state passed legislation making it illegal to knowingly spread its seed).

Today, Marshall Square Park and the Townsend House have only a fraction of their original plantings, many of which were documented in an 1853 edition of the Pennsylvania Farm Journal, an influential journal that was then published in West Chester.  Still, much of the physical landscape design remains including its original entrance, with a circular walkways around a large fountain at N. Franklin and Marshall streets.   

As designed by Hoopes, Marshall Square Park had numerous practical features including a basin for collecting rainfall and a special brick promenades modeled after the pedestrian-friendly Washington Square Park in Philadelphia. The first of these pathways ran along the northeast entrance towards the fountain and were later expanded to about three feet wide by brick gutters or “swales” designed to prevent soil erosion. 

Other pathways were altered in 1893 and 1894, several years after the reservoir was filled in and replaced by a Civil War monument honoring the 97th Regiment. By the turn-of-the-century, the park also included a summer house known as the “Swiss Cottage,” a tool shed used by the park’s full-time gardener, and such popular attractions as band concerts in the gazebo and a zoo full of small exotic animals.

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