A Homecoming - July 2021
There’s a line in the John Denver song “Rocky Mountain High” that says he was “…coming home to a place he’d never been before…”. Although John was famously talking about Colorado and not Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, recent visitors to the Osceola Mill House can now claim that line as their own as well.
A few weeks ago, I received a message through our website contact form from Lisa Sorensen. Lisa lives in the Chicago area and told me that while doing some genealogical research about her family, she found a reference to the Osceola Mill House on Ancestry.com. Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic, and like many of us, in order to overcome the boredom and isolation, Lisa and her cousin, Vivian Ciavara, long separated by time and distance, reconnected through social media. The cousins passed the time sharing information about their shared family history. They had been able to trace the family back six generations, through Hostetters, Royers, and Hoovers – all of those good Lancaster County names – to Jacob and Elizabeth Ludwig who owned a good-sized mill along the Pequea Creek. It was Jacob and Elizabeth who in 1766, on the land adjacent to the mill, built a three-story stone house for their family home. Then known as the Mill House Mansion, we now know it as the Osceola Mill House.
As the pandemic eased and everyone was immunized, the cousins and their husbands planned a trip to Lancaster County to meet yet another cousin here, and find some of the properties around the County that had been in the family. So it was that on July 15, 2021, I was able to open our front door and give a big “Welcome Home” to Lisa and Vivian.
After introductions and pleasantries in the Gathering Room, we started our tour by walking out onto Osceola Mill Road to show them the peak stone at the top of the third floor that bears the building date – 1766 – and the initials of their sixth-great- grandparents. As we then walked through the house, I was able to share with them some of the stories passed down to me about their family. One such tale, as yet unsubstantiated, is that just as the House was finished, the local Church elders came calling on Jacob and Elizabeth. After a tour, the elders told the couple that the home, with its high peaked roof and jack-arches over the first-floor windows, was a little too fancy for a good Mennonite family, and they should tear it down and start over. Presumably, they declined.
We ended our tour in the dining room, where we talked about the grandeur of the house – very unusual for a home of the 18th century. One would not expect such high ceilings, ornate moldings, and the deep built-in cabinets in a house built in 1766. We also spoke of the generations of owners between the Ludwigs and Ron and I – how each caretaker had preserved the Mill house. Finally, I was able to share with them historic documents about the property that we have accumulated during our time here. I emptied my files of deeds, historic reports, newspaper clippings and other bits and pieces of their precious family history.
What a joy it was for me to share this home and its history with Lisa and Vivian! While it is where Ron and I live, it is truly their home as well. We are merely the custodians and caretakers for this period of the life of the Millhouse, but it belongs to the families who were born, lived and died in the protection of her rafters.
“…..Coming home to a place he’d never been before….”
