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History
The Thomas Massey House is a monument to the American Dream....
The home of an indentured servant who became a landowner,
and like the American dream the house has endured almost 300
years. The
Thomas Massey House is unique in that so much of the original
has survived. 
The Thomas
Massey house is going to be featured in the next Charles Adams
Ghost book.
1696 Thomas Massey House, Broomall, Pa In 1683, at the age of eighteen, Thomas Massey left
old England for the chance at a better life in America. As a
member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as the
Quakers), Massey and his fellow believers were subject to
fines and imprisonment for worshipping as they pleased and not
supporting the official state church – the Church of
England. Additionally, his prospects for property ownership
were limited since very wealthy people owned most of the land.
As a farmer in England he would have to rent a plot of ground
and hope to eke out a living making just enough money to pay
his rent. Wanting a better future, Massey joined the thousands
of the “middling” and poor English, Scots, and Welsh who
decided to “push fortune” and emigrate to a new North
American colony established by prominent Quaker William Penn
as a refuge for other Friends – Pennsylvania. Unable to pay for his passage, Massey struck a
bargain with wealthy Quaker Francis Standfield, who also was
headed for Penn’s colony. In return payment for his passage,
Massey signed an indenture that required him to work for
Standfield for a period of five to seven years. At the end of
this time, Standfield, in turn, agreed to give him “freedom
dues… according to the custom of the country.” In these
early years, freedom dues in Pennsylvania included one new
suit of clothes, ten bushels of wheat or fourteen of corn, one
axe, two hoes and, most importantly, land. On July 11, 1683,
Massey and seven other indentured servants in the employ of
the Standfield family joined twenty-three other Quaker
families and embarked on the “Endeavour” out of Liverpool
for far-away Pennsylvania. The ship made landfall at Upland
(present-day Chester) on September 29, 1683. Just twenty-eight
days after he turned nineteen, Thomas Massey embarked on a new
life. At the end of
his time of service, Massey received his promised freedom dues
– 100 acres of land near present-day Broomall - fifty from
Francis Standfield and fifty from proprietor William Penn. Now
an independent landowner, he worked quickly to clear some of
his ground, build a shelter, and plant crops. In short order,
he built a log home and began to farm. In 1692, Massey married
twenty-two-year-old Phebe Taylor and began to raise a family.
Four years later, he was able to buy an additional two hundred
acres of land from James Standfield, the son of his former
master. In the same year he started to build a brick addition
to his log cabin for his wife and their two young children,
Ester and Mordecai. When finished, the new brick home
contained a walk-in fireplace and beehive oven (a domed oven
for baking, built into the side of the house). Measured by the standards of the day, a
new brick home was a substantial accomplishment that indicated
Massey’s success. Comfort and security, a beautiful brick
house, a 300-acre plantation, and freedom of worship was more
– much more – than he ever could have expected back in
England. When Thomas Massey died in 1708, he left his home and
property to his eldest son Mordecai, who remodeled the house
in the early 1730s and tore down the original log cabin,
replacing it with a stone addition and kitchen. In 1964 a
Massey descendant, Lawrence M.C. Smith, saved the home from
demolition by buying it and donating it to Marple Township for
preservation. Today, the restored Thomas Massey home sits on
one acre of his former plantation. Thomas Massey’s rise from indentured
servant to an independent farmer, homeowner and landowner
demonstrated the opportunities that drew more Europeans to
Pennsylvania than to any of Britain’s other North American
colonies in the eighteenth century. His experience and the
experiences of others like him, inspired tens of thousands in
the eighteenth century to come to a place that many people by
the 1720s were calling “the best poor man’s country in the
world.” Farmers like Massey and his descendants, and the
descendants of so many other immigrants who followed, were the
foundation of Pennsylvania’s economy and the backbone of its
society for generations to come.
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