Biographies

Townsends in Millsboro Delaware
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From the early 1930s on the dominate "crop" produced in the Millsboro areas as in most other parts of Sussex County was the broiler. The poultry business had the major advantage over most other types of agriculture that it could be carried on all year, thus reducing the risk of a particular crop. The leading practitioner of this business locally was an is Townsend's, Inc. The Townsend family which had long been involved in lumber, strawberry cultivation, orchards and canneries gradually converted its vast Indian Swan Orchards just east of Millsboro to the production of poultry and related products between the mid-1930s and the mid-1950s. By the 1940s, Townsend's, Inc. had become the nation's first fully integrated poultry company, meaning that they had every aspect of poultry growing under their control from the hatching of eggs and the growing of grain for poultry feed to dressing the birds and shipping them to market, although Townsend's, Inc. was the largest local poultry company there were and still are many others.
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TOWNSEND, George Alfred, author, born in Georgetown, Delaware, 30 January, 1841. His father, the Reverend Stephen Townsend, a Methodist clergyman for half a century, studied and practised medicine at the age of fifty, and at seventy obtained the degree of Ph.D. by actual university study. The son was educated mainly in Philadelphia, where he began writing for the press and speaking in public, and in 1860 adopted the profession of journalism. In 1862 he was a war-correspondent of the New York "Herald," describing for that journal McClellan's peninsula campaign and Pope's campaign in northern Virginia. Later in the year he went to Europe, where he wrote for English and American periodicals, and lectured on the civil war. In 1864 he became war-correspondent of the New York "World," was permitted to sign his letters, and quickly made a reputation as a descriptive writer. After the war he became a professional lecturer, continuing also his miscellaneous writing for the press, and!

, going to Europe, described the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. His pen-name, "Gath," was first used in 1868 in letters to the Chicago " Tribune." In 1885 he built a house on the battle-field of Crampton's Gap, South Mountain, Maryland, where a small village has since sprung up, to which he gives the name Gapland. His publications in book-form are "The Bohemians," a play (New York, 1862): "Campaigns of a, Non-Combatant" (1865): Life of Garibaldi' (1867);" Real Life of Abraham Lincoln " (1867): " The New World compared with the Old" (1868); "Poems " (1870) ; "Washington Outside and Inside" (1871); "Mormon Trials at Salt Lake" (1872) ; "Washington Re-builded" (1873) ; "Tales of the Chesapeake" (1880); "Bohemian Days" (1881); "Poetical Addresses" (1883); "The Entailed Hat" (1884) ; "President Cromwell." a drama (1885); "Katy of Catoctin," a novel (1886); and a campaign life of Levi P. Morton (1888). He is now writing a romance entitled "Dr. Priestley, or the Federalists."

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