MILESTONES. 67 



from the public gibbet that stood at the intersection of Edg- 

 mont and Providence Avenues, in Chester, as an edifying and 

 warning spectacle to all people (who no doubt turned out eyi 

 masse on that occasion), and as the milestones were not 

 erected until some two generations later, they at any rate were 

 never used as rendezvous nor as places whereat the timorous 

 traveler was relieved of his valuables by the County's notable 

 villain in question. The pike incorporation was in 1848. 



Baltimore Pike. This road was incorporated as a pike 

 in 1811 under the name of the Philadelphia, Brandywine and 

 New London Turnpike Company. A tablet still easily visible 

 in the north wall of the stone bridge over Stony Brook, in 

 Springfield Township — where the road crosses the brook — 

 relates how John Thomson " built gratis " the bridge for the 

 company. And Thomson was a notable, too, in engineering 

 work in that section, and was the father of J. Edgar Thom- 

 son, for nearly a generation the president of the Pennsj'lvania 

 Railroad in its great formative period from 1852 to 1874. The 

 old family place stands just west of the bridge. 



For some reason, though, that I have not yet ascertained, 

 there seems to never have been, at least in recent days, either 

 milestones or toll gates on this road. Friend L. D. Pyle, the 

 genial blacksmith of Ivy Mills, Concord Township, says that 

 during fifty years' residence in that neighborhood he never 

 heard of any ; though he added, with a quiet humor, " There 

 are plenty of stones to the mile." I have traveled this road 

 many, many times, from its beginning in the County at 

 Cobb's Creek, at Angora, to its end at Chadd's Ford, twenty 

 miles, and the longest stretch of road in the County, and have 

 never seen a milestone on it excepting just one. That one 

 stands a little east of the trolley station of the Collingdale 

 branch of the Philadelphia and West Chester trolley com- 

 pany, in Clifton Heights, but was probably erected — when, 

 there is nothing whatever to indicate — by some private indi- 

 vidual. Very likely it was near some tavern of those days, 



