In looking at the history of the 2606 acres that are now Ridley Creek State Park, a lot of familiar names popped up. Part of the property was owned by several generations of the Bishop family – who lived “down in the hollow” and operated a mill along the creek. From Newtown, you would turn down Bishop’s Hollow Road to take your grain to mill. Years later a new owner renamed the mill complex: Sycamore Mills. The road there from Rt 352? You guessed it – Sycamore Mills Road. Frequent fires and floods were the lot of wooden mills along a stream that provided water power. Mill works were damaged, destroyed, new owners took over. By 1900, steam and coal meant that mills did not have to sit along a stream and so mills and small mill communities like Sycamore Mills were abandoned to their fate.
Wealthy sportsman Samuel Riddle (Riddle Hospital, Riddle Ale House) bought the farms and mill properties around Sycamore Mills in the early 1900’s. He is best known nationally as the owner of Man O’ War, considered one of the greatest racing horses of the 20th century. Riddle was also President of the Rose Tree Hunt Club. In the time before suburbs, fox hunters ranged far afield across the farmlands in Delaware County. Riddle bought up the farms and invited local hunt clubs, Rose Tree, Radnor and West Chester, to use on hunting occasions.
Riddle had no children, but he had a niece named Sarah that he doted on. When she married Walter
Jeffords in 1914, Uncle Samuel gave the couple a nice wedding gift – 600+ acres of the Sycamore Mills property on which they would take an old farmhouse and turn it into a Gothic Revival mansion that won an award from the American Institute of Architects. They named the house “Hunting Hill.”
When Walter died in 1960, his son Walter Jr. inherited the property. He looked into several options for developing a part of the land while preserving the rest. A neighbor, Nether Providence councilman Henry Gouley, proposed turning the whole property into a state park. Walter Jr. was intrigued but explored alternatives, asking the 
Township to consider reducing the lot size in the current zoning from 4 acres to 1 acre – to allow for 1300 building lots on the property. The tax revenue from such a change was tempting, but the Township denied the request. The State had been following the local fights for several years, and in 1966 filed to condemn the property to take it for use as a state park. Improvements had to be planned and roads built. The Ridley Creek State Park opened to the public in August of 1972.
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