Desolate Danneltown

Several times each week, I drive through part of Haycock Township on Stoney Garden Road. Mostly forest and many boulders, there's not too much that catches my attention. There's a few old houses, including a well-preserved log home near Potters Lane. There's a handful of not-so-old homes, spaced randomly in isolated clearings. There's a tiny old schoolhouse, at the corner where I turn off onto Roundhouse Road. Near that intersection, there also used to be a pottery in the 19^th century. Further east, on both sides of Stoney Garden Road, between Reed Lane and Potter lane, there once was a small hamlet called Danneltown.  Some records list it as Danielstown and Danielsville.  

Some time before 1850, two brothers, Hiram and Jesse O'Dannel emigrated from Ireland and chose home sites just north of Haycock mountain. They didn't purchase the land and would be considered by today's vocabulary as squatters.  But, this was likely unclaimed land as it was unsuitable for any cultivation and they were able to obtain titles.  On a township map of 1850, the home sites of H. O'Dannel and J. O'dannel are shown on the south side of Stoney Garden Road, where it crosses the smaller hump of Haycock Mountain, also called “Little Haycock”. 

After the O'Dannel brothers settled and built their small log homes, others came and built more modest log "huts" in the immediate area.  Supposedly they were mostly Irish immigrants, perhaps drawn to the area to work on the Delaware canal.  Although, the descriptions of the homes and inhabitants indicate there may not have been a significant source of income. Written accounts imply that the residents seem to be a little "rough".  Other than an obituary, county records show nothing of the hamlet, but names of residents of Danneltown occasionally appear in court dockets.

Danneltown was not like the remaining historic villages we see in Upper Bucks. First, it wasn't at any major crossroad. Second, it didn't have a post office, general store, tavern, merchant shop or fine homes. There are very few first hand accounts of the village, but they all have a common description. These describe the village as a group of squalid shacks.  In General Davis' A History of Bucks County, he describes it as "a rude hamlet called Danielsville".

John Rogers, a local newspaper writer for the Democrat and Inteligencer described Danielstown and Desolation: 

"Now our words for it, and we will wager our pile on its truthfulness, that as far as you have traveled, or as many miles you've been, this hamlet wins the premium in the poverty-stricken line; as it was long noted upon the criminal records of our county to be without a peer in the calendar of crime and promiscuous general worthlessness".

In Place Names in Bucks County, the author George MacReynolds describes:

"Dannelstown was a self-existent community, with tragedy (perhaps sometimes a little roguery) alternating with festivity."

Unfortunately, the hamlet and it's buildings where completely gone by the 1920s.