Marcus Hook Preservation Society

The Plank house is known on the Historic
Register Eligibility List as
Blackbeard’s Mistress’
House. We bought the
house for two reasons, the
first being that the house
we live in now is too large
for two people after all our
girls grew up and had girls
of their own. The second is
that Jen told us that the
local town wanted to buy
the house and tear it down
in order to build a new
home in it’s plac

e. We
Plank House
Marcus Hook Plank House
c. 1720’s
couldn’t let this happen
even knowing the house
needed work, we decided
to buy it. Jen let us start cleaning
the house before we went
to settlement. My wife
really wanted a new
kitchen so I started gutting
the old one. Much to my
surprise I fell through the
kitchen floor. There was
no crawl space and the dirt
was half way up the side
of the beams. I started
looking through the dirt
and found many pieces of
plates. The artifacts
looked old, so I suspected
that there might be
something to the legends
about the house. I called up
a local historian that I knew. He came to the house about
an hour later with two other
men who, after taking a
brief look, asked to poke a
hole in the wall. I said “ok”
and the next thing I know I
was buying a plank house
from the late 17th Century. After settlement we started
opening up and exploring
the rest of the house. To my
amazement the old Plank
House was still intact. Since that time (2004),
many important people
have come to see the house
as well as many volunteers.