Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Loveville, Delaware

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (non-admin closure) RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 19:00, 31 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Loveville, Delaware

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Delaware Place Names calls this a "locality", and this bit of amateur history claims it was a very early post office which never really took as town. A boosterish bit of writing in the late 1800s gives it a population of 50, which is highly questionable: Cram's Universal Atlas of the same period doesn't list it. Topos and aerials consistently show it as a T intersection and nothing more. I don't think this was a real settlement. Mangoe (talk) 21:09, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. jp×g 22:56, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Delaware-related deletion discussions. jp×g 22:56, 24 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: USGS maps show the coordinates as a part of Mill Creek with a couple houses on a couple roads in 1901, 1904, 1943, 1954, and 1993. There's no "Loveville" label in any of these years. In 1993 there's "Alliance Church" to the south, "Stuyvesant Hills" to the northwest, "Cokesbury Village" to the northeast and "Westgate Farms" to the southeast. In 2011 (when USGS topo maps started being automatically generated by computers from GNIS data), the label appears -- but I don't see any evidence that any human being in the last 130 years looked at a map of the area and said "yep, that's Loveville". On Google's satellite maps you can see that the coordinates are located on a "Loveville Road", which I think is where the label comes from; unless someone can come up with sourcing that refers to Loveville as a real populated place, I think this is a "delete". jp×g 01:39, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete - Although the name was used in reference to the area around the intersection for a long time (I found an article from 1957 about a house fire near Loveville), it doesn't appear to have been a distinct community and doesn't meet the GNG requirement for a populated place without legal recognition. –dlthewave ☎ 13:57, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. This place is discussed in early histories of Delaware (including The Biographical and Genealogical History of the State of Delaware and he History of Delaware, 1609-1888, Volume I) and in early newspaper articles. It's clear the hamlet's heyday was the 1830s to the 1860s, based on those references. Loveville was the site of the mill of noted abolitionist and Quaker Thomas Worrell, with the mill being a likely site of the Underground Railroad.[1] Loveville itself was called a "hamlet" with a population of 50 in the 1870s. User:Mangoe is to be commended for checking Cram's 1890 atlas for population figures, but by the 1870s, Loveville had lost its post office and was in decline. I've reworked the article a bit, making it clear this is a historical hamlet, not a modern town. More work will be done soon. Firsfron of Ronchester 18:31, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per references establishing it as historical community. Djflem (talk) 21:09, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep per WP:HEY and Firsfron's banger of an expansion. Woo! jp×g 22:30, 25 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Keep As Firsfon has demonstrated this this is/was an actual community, with census figures many years ago. ~EDDY ^{(talk/contribs)}~ 01:09, 27 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.