The Jeremiah Brown Mill
At 1416 Telegraph Road, behind the animal enclosures, stands the oldest structure at Plumpton Park Zoo — a Colonial water-powered gristmill whose first stones were laid in 1734. The Jeremiah Brown House and Mill Site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 2, 1987.
1734: a Quaker miller on North East Creek
Jeremiah Brown Sr. was a Quaker who came south from Pennsylvania into what was then the Nottingham Lots, the tract of land along the Maryland–Pennsylvania border settled largely by Friends. In 1734 he went into partnership with the millwright William Coale and built a water corn and grist mill on North East Creek. An eighteenth-century sawmill stood on the same complex, so the farms around Rising Sun could have their grain ground and their timber cut in one trip.
The choice of site was not sentimental. A gristmill needs a reliable head of water and enough drop to turn a wheel through a dry August, and this bend of North East Creek supplied both.
The houses
Brown built the stone house that anchors the site in 1757. A log dwelling had stood on the property since about 1702; in 1904 John Clayton replaced it with the frame house that survives today. Together with the mill and a nineteenth-century bank barn, the four buildings make up the historic district recognized by the National Register.
The stone house is not a museum piece. Zoo keepers live in it today, so a 1757 Quaker farmhouse is working staff housing rather than an exhibit, and there is someone on the property around the clock. The carvings the original masons cut into the stone are still there in the walls around them.
Four families, two centuries
The mill did not stay in one pair of hands. Joseph Reynolds bought the property in 1776. It came back to the Brown family in 1890, when Howard Brown acquired it, and after a fire he rebuilt much of the mill in 1892. The Plumstead family purchased the property in 1946 — the same family whose son, Edward C. Plumstead, would open a zoo on the land forty years later. Plumstead was a keen student of history, and he was instrumental in saving both this homestead and the Brick Meeting House nearby; the mill still standing today owes a good deal to him.
Lightning, and the rebuild
In 1971 lightning struck the mill and destroyed it. Rather than clear the site, the owners rebuilt: the following year a reconstruction went up on the original stone foundation, worked from historical sketches of the 1734 and 1892 buildings. Original millstones still lie outside the structure, and a catshead sack hoist was fitted in the mid-1960s, before the fire.
It is a reproduction, and the zoo says so plainly — but it stands where the mill stood, on the stone Jeremiah Brown’s masons set, above the creek that turned it.
On the National Register
The Jeremiah Brown House and Mill Site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on November 2, 1987 under reference number 87001391.
The original nomination document is public and worth reading. It describes the 1757 stone house in the Pennsylvania Quaker building tradition, records the carved initials of the craftsmen still visible in the stonework and the original interior paneling, and places the property among the Nottingham Lots that William Penn laid out in 1701.
A historical marker erected by Plumpton Park Zoo records the essentials: first mill on this site built by Jeremiah Brown Sr. in 1734, partially rebuilt in 1892 by Howard Brown, reconstructed in 1971.
Seeing the mill
You do not have to go looking for the mill. It stands beside the admissions area at the front of the zoo and houses the gift shop, so it is one of the first things you come to rather than something tucked away on the grounds. It is not visible from Telegraph Road, which is why most people do not know a 1734 mill is here until they arrive. Plan a visit.