About the year 1800, Peter Bechtel bought two paper mills on Cresheim Creek in Germantown Township, Philadelphia. The Cresheim is a tributary of the Wissahickon, and the mill seats — a short distance west of today's McCallum Street Bridge, along what is now West Cliveden Street — lie inside the modern Wissahickon Valley Park. Bechtel ran the mills for some three decades. The road to them was renamed for him in his lifetime: Peter Bechtel's Mill Road. When he died in 1838, his executors advertised both mills for sale in a Philadelphia newspaper, in the fullest description of a Wissahickon-country paper mill ever printed. His son Peter bought the home mill for $8,000, worked it with a cylinder paper machine, and died in January 1842, forty-five years old.
This feature tells both men's story from the records that document it — church registers, censuses, wills, executors' accounts, newspaper advertisements, and a 1929 court decision that recites the family's deed chain. Where the records disagree, it prints the disagreement. Nothing here rests on a source that was not read; the sources are listed in full at the foot.
A master paper maker before the mills
Bechtel was born in September 1766 — his burial record says the 13th, his death entry the 15th, and both dates are printed rather than reconciled. His parents were George and Susan Bechtel. Where he was born and trained, no record found says.
His trade first surfaces in Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, in runaway-apprentice advertisements signed Peter Bechtel: in November 1797 he offered fifteen dollars for Joseph Barnet, "an apprentice to the paper making business," and in September 1799 he advertised again for Barnet and a second runaway, Isaiah Comly. Identifying the Lower Merion master with the Cresheim miller rests on converging evidence — the name, the trade, the same apprentice in both notices, and the timing, the advertisements ending just before the Cresheim purchase of about 1800 — and it is printed as an identification, not a certainty; no document bridges the two townships, and Montgomery County is background here, never the Wissahickon tie. By October 1808 Bechtel is documented in Germantown itself, named on the committee of vigilance of a township meeting in Poulson's American Daily Advertiser.
Two mills, one road, fifty-three acres
Samuel Fitch Hotchkin's Ancient and Modern Germantown, Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill (1889), written from the account of an old resident, David Hinkle, states the purchase in one line: Peter Bechtel "bought both of these mills about the year 1800." The lower mill stood near the modern 1100 block of West Cliveden Street, the upper near the Germantown Cricket Club grounds, on a tract of about fifty-three acres. Charles Ellet's 1843 map of Philadelphia County labels the seats "Bechtel's Paper Mill."
The road that served the mills had been Billmeyer's Mill Road; the deeds, as a court recited them in 1929, call it afterwards Peter Bechtel's Mill Road. The predecessor Billmeyer is otherwise unknown — no record read names him, and he is not the Germantown printer Michael Billmeyer. In the 1820 census, the two Bechtel households that are certainly the family's count sixteen persons engaged in manufactures between them: a paper-making establishment of real size on a township creek. A third 1820 household, indexed "Peter Bechtel Senior," holds no male over twenty-five and cannot be the fifty-three-year-old miller; the contradiction is printed in the dossier and cannot be resolved on the present evidence.
The sale advertisement of 1838
Bechtel died on March 10, 1838, and was buried at St. Michael's Lutheran Church, Germantown, where ten of his children had been baptized. His will — made July 18, 1837 — left everything to his wife Margaret for life, then to be sold and divided into eight equal shares among his sons Jacob, George, Peter, Henry, Paul, and Joseph and his daughters Susan and Maria. It charged his son George with an advancement of $2,517.72, money already in George's hands, to count against his share but never to be collected. The will names no mill; the mills' story is in the settlement.
On November 21, 1838, the Pennsylvania Inquirer carried the executors' advertisement, "Valuable Mills & Real Estate." Lot No. 1: a stone paper mill 40 by 50 feet, four stories, "fitted up with two engines," a stone drying house 80 by 34 feet, a mansion house, and five parcels summing to about 52 acres — with "a never failing stream of water, having 35 feet head and fall." It was occupied by the son, Peter Bechtel Jr. Lot No. 3: a second stone paper mill, 35 by 45 feet, with one pair of engines, about 24 acres and a four-acre dam, 30 feet of head and fall, occupied by another son, Joseph. Possession was promised for April 1, 1839.
The settlement: $8,000, $6,000, and a mortgage inside the family
The executors' accounts — two of them, sworn in 1839 and 1840, and both read for this biography — record what the sale advertisement began. Joseph Carr, a neighbouring miller, bought a messuage, paper mill, and tract from the estate for $6,000, half of it on his own bond and mortgage. Peter Bechtel Jr. bought the home mill property for $8,000 — and $6,500 of the price was his own bond and mortgage back to his father's estate, which collected interest on it into 1840. The family financed its own succession; the estate held the son's paper. A third sale, to a "Jas Bechtel" at $700, matches no James anywhere in the family's records; the name stands as the account writes it, unidentified. And George's $2,517.72 advancement appears in neither account, and no distribution to any heir is listed in either — an absence the record leaves open.
One limit is printed with the figures: the accounts never name the December 1838 vendue or its lots, so the match between the accounts' sales and the advertisement's lots is correspondence — of price, property, and timing — not the accounts' own statement.
The son: paper maker, machine owner, dead at forty-five
Peter Bechtel Jr. (1796–1842) married Margaret Hortter at Germantown on April 13, 1820. Through the 1820s he advertised for runaway apprentices in the National Gazette, signing himself "Paper Maker" — David Brightbill in 1825, Ebenezer Denning in 1826, Jacob Burnheater in 1828, at a reward of six cents. In 1840 his Germantown household held seven persons, three in manufactures and trades.
His will, signed January 16, 1842, directs his executors to sell his real estate if they think it best, "as my property is much encumbered," and hopes "that some of my family will be able to purchase the same and carry on the business… as my sons will soon be of an age to conduct the same." He was dead within twelve days; the probate was sworn January 28, 1842. His inventory values a cylinder paper machine at $2,500 — the most valuable item in an estate totalling $6,106.37½ — with a steam boiler, two engines, and a paper cutter behind it. The Cresheim seat had entered the machine age under the second Bechtel, and its documented paper making ends with him, in 1842 — not in 1833, the date Hotchkin gives for the mills' paper years, a tension the dossier prints unresolved.
After the Bechtels
The mill tract stayed in the family until Henry H. Houston bought it in 1882; the seats passed to successor firms — Carr, Hill & Wild, then the France paper company — who have their own entries in this collection. The road kept Bechtel's name into the automobile age: in Commonwealth ex rel. v. Faux, 95 Pa. Super. 482 (1929), the Superior Court of Pennsylvania upheld Peter Bechtel's Mill Road at its historic width of thirty-three feet, quoting the deed of 1838 that ran "to Peter Bechtel." The road is West Cliveden Street today. No portrait of either Bechtel is known, and no period view of the mills was found; the map is the picture this story has.
Timeline
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Sep 13 or 15, 1766 | Peter Bechtel born (records conflict; both printed) |
| Nov 1797 – Sep 1799 | Lower Merion runaway-apprentice advertisements (identification printed with its basis) |
| About 1800 | Buys both Cresheim paper mills |
| 1820 | Sixteen manufactures hands across the family's two certain households |
| Apr 13, 1820 | Peter Bechtel Jr. marries Margaret Hortter |
| Jul 18, 1837 | Sr.'s will — eight shares; George's $2,517.72 advancement |
| Mar 10, 1838 | Sr. dies; buried at St. Michael's, Germantown |
| Nov 21, 1838 | Executors advertise both mills — Pennsylvania Inquirer |
| 1839 | Settlement sales: Carr $6,000; Peter Jr. $8,000 ($6,500 on mortgage) |
| Oct 21, 1839 | Margaret Bechtel dies |
| Jan 1842 | Jr. dies, aged 45; his inventory lists a $2,500 cylinder paper machine |
| 1882 | Mill tract sold to Henry H. Houston |
| Mar 1, 1929 | Faux decided — the road kept at 33 feet under Bechtel's name |
