The History of Rockland Village

The History of Rockland Village. The history of a paper making village. , These buildings and dam complex were once pan of the community of Rockland, built over 200 years ago on the banks of the Brandywine River. The Brandywine supplied water power to the Rockland Mill and a dozen others in the Wilmington region., The mill buildings have a rich history and are still used today. They have been completed into housing that maintains as much of the original architecture as possible. The 1881 village store is operating today as a post office and a real business., The many lives of the housing mill , In 1793, William Young, a prosperous bookseller and printer from Philadelphia, came to Rockland looking for property on which to build a paper mill. Here he found a dependable source of water to power the mill. Equally as important the population of the village was large enough to supply the quantity of cotton rags that were essential to the papermaking process., Young later developed a process for the manufacture of high quality paper that would not depend on rags. This process produced paper from a mixture of mulberry roots and green bark. Unfortunately, the process was not a success and rag paper continued to be the main product. The mill's leading customer was the U.S. Treasury, which bought paper for printing stamps., In 1814 the entire paper mill burned. Young rebuilt and decided to switch to woolen manufacturing. He added the manufacture of cotton textiles in 1822. After his death in 1829, the Rockland Manufacturing Company was left to his sons. After years of losing money, they sold the mill at public auction in 1854., In 1860, August Jessup and Bloomfield Moore bought the complex and Rockland became, once again, a prosperous paper mill town. The Jessup and Moore Paper Company produced top quality paper used for books, magazines and lithographs. It closed in 1933, a victim of the Great Depression., In 1940, the complex was purchased again. Tissue and napkins were main products of the Doeskin Mill. The business thrived during the 1950's and early 1960's. After the mill closed in 1971, the buildings began a new life as homes and businesses., A mill workers' village , Throughout its history, Rockland remained a small village. Set on a steep hill, the village had between 200 and 400 residents. Most the stone and brick houses were owned by management and labor personnel of the mill., [Captions:] , William Young, the founder of the mill, built this large stone mansion, called Black Gates, at the top of Rockland Hill. The house was sold by the family during the hard financial times of the 1940's. Today, the house is still occupied and stands on land owned by the Woodlawn Trust., This painting was created by J.R. Smith in 1835 looking east across the Brandywine River. It shows the bridge, built in 1820 by German bridge builder Lewis Wernwag, between Kirk's Mill on the west bank, and Young's Mill on the east bank., A section of Brandywine Creek State Park (pictured) was once part of Rockland village. This map shows a tract of land belonging to the Rockland Manufacturing Co. surveyed in 1849.,

"Traveling a dirt road on the bank of the Brandywine River though heavy woodland, we soon approached Rockland Dam. The village just below is composed chiefly of old stone dwellings built for the use of the mill workers." , Along the Brandywine by Frank Zebley