10/30/2026
Gallows Hill, located just outside the town limits of West Chester, was the ex*****on site for residents convicted of capital crimes throughout the 1800s in Chester County. Selected some time after the county seat was moved from Chester to West Chester in 1786, Gallows Hill did not witness its first ex*****on until 1805. Benjamin Hunt, a resident of West Chester, who witnessed the event, noted that the ex*****on was attended by a crowd of “perhaps 2,000 to 3,000” residents.
Beyond Hunt’s brief observation, the history of Gallows Hill is only faintly captured in the historical record. When residents petitioned for the construction of a public road in West Goshen Township in 1840, they noted that the proposed road would lead “at a point in the Strasburg Road [modern-day Paoli Pike] near ‘Gallowshill.’” The site continued to serve as a well-known landmark throughout the century. References to Gallows Hill continued to appear in road records as late as 1868, though it is unlikely that ex*****ons took place there at that time. A 1906 article from the Daily Local News reported that the Gallows Hill site was rightly named “fifty years ago, when public ex*****ons took place there,” but the macabre name no longer defined the neighborhood.
The site was renamed Cottage Hill by John J. Parker, who built several houses on the site that same year.
