Magnolia: Quakers, peaches...and murder?

Matthew Lowber House

 How small is Magnolia? The town website says it all: “If your street address is not Walnut Street, Main Street, Thorn Street or Jado Terrace, you are not a town resident.”

Magnolia is on land once owned by the Duke of York, who loved magnolia trees, hence the town’s name. I’d read that magnolia trees are planted throughout town, but we noticed only one. According to legend, the town was located a mile from the St. Jones River to escape mosquitoes. It was not formally incorporated until 1885, making it one of the newer towns on the Delaware Bayshore Byway. The local citizens who founded it laid it out in a circle as a sign of brotherhood.

Magnolia has three particularly interesting historic sites. One is Matthew Lowber House pictured above. It’s a Quaker farmhouse that was built around 1774 at the intersection of Main and Walnut Streets. In the early 1980s it was moved to its current location, just north of the firehouse on the east side of North Main Street. The construction date and Lowber’s initials appear in one of the gables, but they’re not visible from the street. The frame addition was added around 1855.

Sign in front of Matthew Lowber House

A block or two south of Matthew Lowber House, on the same side of Main Street, is John B.Lindale House. It was built in the late 1800s or early 1900s (sources give varying dates) for one of Delaware’s last peach barons.

John Lindate House in Magnolia

It’s hard to believe now, but for much of the 1800s Delaware was the country’s leading producer of peaches. That’s why Delaware’s state flower is the peach blossom and its state food is peach pie. By 1875 Delaware shipped 6 million baskets in one year (and this meant Delaware also had a huge basket-making industry). Peach orchard owners were so prosperous that they built elaborate homes such as this one. The “peach mansions” built in northern Delaware in the mid-1800s acquired a distinctive look; a great example is Chelsea outside Delaware City (see my Delaware City blog post). 

From the history trail in Woodland Beach Wildlife Area

All that changed around the turn of the 20^th century, when a virus spread by aphids called Peach Yellows began killing the trees. By the time a treatment was found, peach growers had lost so much money that they burned their orchards and turned them into pasture or orchards with other fruit such as apples. Today there are only three major peach orchards in Delaware.

UPDATE 8/3/2021: Middletown Historical Society has a great essay on Delaware's peach industry with old photos here. 

Outside the Matthew Lowber House is a sign from the late 1800s proclaiming Magnola as the center of the universe. There’s obviously a story behind this delightfully quirky sign (Who put it here? Why?), but I couldn’t find any information on it.

Magnolia's Center of the Universe sign

Just north of Magnolia on the east side of Main Street is Murderkill/Motherkill/Motherkiln Friends’ Burial Ground. (The signs here use all three names.)

Entrance to Murderkill/Motherkill/Motherkiln Friends Burial Ground

The graves date back to the late 1700s, and there are few remaining markers.

Murderkill/Motherkill/Motherkiln Friends Burial Grou d

One of those buried here is Warner Mifflin, an important abolishionist in the late 1700s.

But I thought what’s most interesting about this graveyard is its names. Murderkill or Motherkill certainly sound pretty gruesome for a Quaker burial ground!

The name stems from the original meeting place of Quakers in this area in the early 1700s, “at the widow Needham’s at Murderkill Creek.” Murderkill Creek or River is about five miles away. In the mid-1700s Quakers built a meetinghouse on this site. By the early 1800s the group began meeting in Camden, and regular services were no longer held here. In 1844 the meetinghouse was sold and dismantled, leaving the burial ground.

So how did Murderkill River get its gruesome name? While I found some people online saying there were indeed some massacres here involving Native Americans and/or Europeans, the broader consensus seems to be that it's a mangled version of the river's original Dutch name, which was probably either Moeder Kill, which means Mother River, or Modder Kill, which means Muddy River.

Over time, the Quakers changed the name of this meeting house and burial ground to Motherkill, probably figuring that people would know that “kill” means “river” in Dutch (think of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia). But apparently that didn’t work, because they then changed the name to Motherkiln. And that’s why the burial ground is known by all three names today.

[UPDATE 8/15/2021: A reader of my blog pointed me to a letter in Delaware Online by Barbara Slavin of Ocean View Historical Society. Barbara clarifies that the Dutch Moeder means Mother or Mouth of a river.]

If you’re looking for a break while visiting Magnolia, the Magnolia Restaurant is a family restaurant in the center of town.

For more information on the Delaware peach industry and the disease that killed it, see this article in Delaware Online and this article from Delaware Public Media.

For more information on Warner Mifflin and a recent rehabilitation of the Friends’ Burial Ground, see this article on a website about Harriett Tubman.

UPDATE 12/29/2020: The Delaware Public Archives has a good article on Magnolia here.