Woodlawn Trustees, Incorporated

The Woodlawn Trustees, Incorporated, is a non-profit real estate development firm incorporated in Delaware on December 12, 1918, by textile manufacturer William Poole Bancroft (1835-1928). It subsumed Bancroft's earlier, for-profit venture, The Woodlawn Company (1901-1926). The Trustees are responsible for maintaining affordable housing in the ciry of Wilmington and for the orderly development of large tracts of suburban land, mostly located in Brandywine Hundred between Concord Pike and the Brandywine Creek and running north from Rockland Road into Delaware County, Pa.

Like many Quaker industrialists, including the Cadburys in England, the Bancrofts strove to maintain their religious and ethical beliefs in the workplace, particularly by pioneering in welfare work for their employees, including the provision of decent housing and recreational amenities. William P. Bancroft was a founding member of Wilmington's Board of Park Commissioners and donated a large block of family land for Rockford Park. Bancroft was concerned about the orderly growth of cities and convinced that the city would soon outgrow its boundaries. He thus began to buy large tracts of farm land north and west of the city, which he intended to be developed in a planned, rational manner, with ample allowance for parks and other open space. In order to carry out these operations, he formed The Woodlawn Company in 1901. The company's first activities were within the city limits, where it built and rented the "Woodlawn Flats," blocks of row houses and apartments for working people (1903-1914) and the Bancroft Parkway (1912-1932), a tree-lined residential street with a wide planted median running north-south on the west side of town.

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