History

When they weren’t putting food on the table, many people cut timber, or ran sawmills to turn it to lumber. In fact, “A Guide to the First State” (Works Progress Administration), pointed out that Millville “grew up around a ‘steam mill’ (sawmill) operated by Capt. Peter Townsend in the late 19th Century.” Where the timbering cleared the fields, there were crops and livestock, and in the local waterways there were plenty of fish, crabs, clams and oysters. But as Carter described in “Clearing New Ground,” (a biography of Delaware Gov. and U.S. Sen. John G. Townsend Jr.), “the middle 1890s were years of recession…caused by the excesses of the railroad barons and the great Eastern financiers and industrialists in their quest for ever-greater profits. “The downturn came at a time when southern Delaware farmers and businessmen were just beginning to see the marvelous new opportunities opened up by the coming of the railroads, of which the new strawberry business was just one example,” Carter wrote.

He blamed poor roads, and a rail monopoly which levied “outrageous rates in areas like Delmarva,” for stunting Sussex’s economic growth. “The absurdly high rate schedules … were directed particularly at fresh fruits, seafood and other perishables, the very products which Baltimore and Dagsboro Hundreds and Worcester County produced in abundance,” Carter wrote.

Southwestern Sussex Countians were better off, in that they had access to a major alternative shipping route, in the Nanticoke River, Carter noted. Not so on the east side.

“Many Baltimore Hundred men tried to escape the railroad rates by shipping from Townsend’s Landing (now known as Sandy Landing), White’s Creek, and other Indian River shipping points, but that was a much less certain proposition,” he wrote. “The hazards of navigating the shallow Indian River Inlet and the mouth of the Delaware Bay were notorious.” But into the early 20th century, they continued to launch from the local docks and dodge the shoals, up the coast to Philadelphia and New Jersey.

Some of the ships were even built locally — Carter referenced Millville resident Elisha C. Dukes’ sloop, the “Ethel Dukes,” which had been built just north of Millville, at Walter’s Bluff (near Holt’s Landing). Wood’s research lent additional detail — the “Ethel Dukes” had been built in 1888, he found, and had been 41 feet long with a remarkably shallow draft (essential design for the shallow local waterways). “Sloops…and small schooners from 10 tons to just over 40 tons and ranging in length from 30 feet to nearly 60 feet,” Wood wrote, “sailed from such places as Daisey and Pennewell’s Landing in Ocean View, White’s Creek in Millville, Blackwater Creek and Millsboro.”

The Masonic Temple in Millville. He noted the gradual disappearance of these graceful craft in the wake of competition from the railroad, new overland roads and silting on the river and at the landings, with some regret.

The 20th century would bring radios and automobiles, prosperity and depression and prosperity again, and a million new technologies. But these were the times leading up to Millville’s establishment, 100 years ago. And these were the people who founded the town — families of ship captains and watermen, millers and farmers, many of them residents for hundreds of years already, in what would become the town of Millville. The tiny acorn has grown to a sturdy oak since the tiny town of Millville announced its presence in 1906, one century ago this year. And the children of those times have become the town’s elders. But they remember, and as copper leaves swirl back to the tree and green to bud again, their memories lead back to the days when Millville first put down its roots. The winters were apparently harsher in those days — as long-time resident Ruley Banks pointed out, the world had just emerged from the Little Ice Age, and he remembered some of the old-timers’ accounts of the “Blizzard of 1888.” “There was snow up to the eaves of the houses, and the farmers had to tunnel their way out to feed the cattle,” Banks relayed. “I remember a couple of elderly ladies, from Ocean View, who came to the school and talked about it — this was in the 1940s. They said a man had died in that blizzard, and they couldn’t get him out until the snow melted.”

But things warmed up eventually, and Millville started to regain some of the momentum lost during the depression of the late 19th century.

For the most part, the people of the still-remote Baltimore Hundred remained somewhat insulated from the up-ticks and downturns of the broader economy.

Millville locals subsisted much as they had for hundreds of years, digging ditches to drain new farmland, clearing ground, raising their crops and livestock and fishing the local waterways.

In the early days, downtown Millville consisted of four or five dry goods/grocery stores, a feed store and Dr. Hocker’s office. It would be a few years until the locals built a fire hall, but that block had always been the central gathering point.

Cobb remembered an old-fashioned fire truck (pull wagon with a pump) parked in the garage behind Dr. Hocker’s, and a hand-cranked siren above the doctor’s office — but even the hand-cranked siren was a relatively modern development. For years, people simply responded to the center of town whenever the bell at the Millville U.M. rang for two minutes straight.

Firefighters purchased their first motorized fire truck in 1936, and built the hall in the late 1930s, according to the Millville Volunteer Fire Company. It was, and is, situated on the lot where the local boys played ball, bordered on the west by the store run by Phillips’ father, Emmons, and on the east by the store run by McCabe (and later Robert Willey), to the east.

McCabe also had a feed store, right across the street from the fire hall, and Charlie Derrickson had a store where the Salted Rim is now located, between the feed store and Dr. Hocker’s. As Collins remembered, Derrickson was always willing to take fresh eggs or butter, in lieu of cash.

The lot where Dr. Hocker used to “pull teeth, sew you up if you got hurt,” as Robinson put it, has seen a few changes since those days. There was a store along the front for a time, where one could purchase patent medicines. Then the Palmatary family took it over and installed a soda counter, which certainly made it one of Millville’s big social gathering spots. The store eventually passed to members of the Winterbottom family, who ran operations from the original building, for many years.

Looking eastward from the downtown area, there were fields, and beyond, the schoolhouse that predated what is today the Lord Baltimore Elementary School. Children of all ages shared the old school, but high-schoolers moved into the new building once it was completed in 1932. For several years (until the old school was torn down) the buildings stood side by side, and elementary students continued to take their lessons in the classrooms closer to Old School Lane. Whereas the modern school is mostly over the line in Ocean View, the old school truly belonged to Millville.

Westward, past downtown, there was the store that belonged to Wolfe’s grandfather, Elisha Dukes, and then to her father, Harry Dukes Sr. Although the store burned in 1930, Wolfe remembered conversations with her father about the range of goods they sold — including men’s jeans for 50 cents a pair, “75 cents for overhauls.” Another Dukes family property survives, right next door (due east), where local artist Laura Hickman has opened a gallery. It was once a gas station — an Atlantic gas station, and apparently another popular hangout for Millville youth probably up to no good.

Out toward the western edge of town, past the lodge and the church, there was Horace Evans’ garage. Robinson remembered him as a right sort — the kind of mechanic who’d clean a sparkplug, rather than just sell you a new one. A bit further along, as Cobb recalled, there’d been Herbert Evans’ grocery (and shoe store) in the somewhat dilapidated building due west of Shop of the Four Sisters, and an auction house behind the grocery. And all the way out at White’s Neck Road, where there was once a gas station and now the Millville Pet Shop, Cobb remembered it as Lester Kauffman’s Studebaker dealership — and before that, his tractor showroom.

Out near the western edge of town, Debbie Evans runs the Miller’s Creek gift shop in the same building, built in 1947, where Richard Wood and Wilbur Hocker opened their hardware store. And Franklin Bennett continues to keep the family tradition alive at J.S. Bennett & Sons (truck and trailer rentals and towing), now in its third generation. John Swainey Bennett got his start in the area at Horace Evans’ garage, and transitioned to his own shop in the early 1930s. Bennet had started out building truck bodies for hauling poultry, according to his daughter, Betty Evans. A century in perspective As Wolfe summed it up, “it was a different time, a different life.” Isolated, but in many ways, she suggested, early Millville had offered as good a life as a person might hope for, even today. “There were a lot of things we didn’t have, but we didn’t know any better — so we didn’t mind,” Evans reflected. Not everyone had cars, but those who did shared them, Cobb remembered, and they didn’t hesitate to pick up children walking to Lord Baltimore (especially if it was raining). “It was a very small, wholesome, rural town,” Phillips added. “It was laid-back — the whole town, the whole system. I loved it.”

Millville’s story may be the story of every town. They struggle upward from the forest floor, and their citizens pour their labor into them, that they might grow strong and straight.

Millville has grown slowly over the past century — the U.S. Census of 1910 found nearly 200 men and women living in town, and nearly 100 years later, that number still hadn’t reached 300. But whatever changes come, the town will always have that slow century for its heritage — a solid start toward a noble maturity.