A guide book of art, architecture, and historic interests in Pennsylvania
History
A guide book of art, architecture, and historic interests in Pennsylvania
Architecture -- Pennsylvania; Art -- Pennsylvania; Historic buildings -- Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania -- Guidebooks; Pennsylvania -- History
BARTRAM’S GARDEN, 28 acres, open free to the public, one quarter mile
south on Fifty-fourth Street, first botanical garden of international
importance in United States; ground purchased by John Bartram, in 1728;
from here he traveled long distances to Florida, the Adirondacks,
everywhere collecting rare plants that he brought home in his
saddlebags; he wrote down the results of his explorations, and sent to
Europe botanical specimens of great interest, also painted sheets of
illustrations, sending one set to the South Kensington Museum, London,
which are still there in perfect condition; Linnæus proclaimed him the
greatest natural botanist in the world, and sent him books and
apparatus; his quaint old stone house is still standing, built by
himself in 1731; his son, William Bartram, botanist and ornithologist,
published the most complete list of American birds, previous to
Alexander Wilson, whom he greatly assisted. Wilson lived at the corner
of Fifty-first Street and Woodland Avenue, in a log house with an
immense stone chimney. Near Bartram’s Garden, on the Schuylkill River
bank, at the western end of Gray’s Ferry Bridge, is site of Gray’s
Garden, pleasure resort, time of Washington, reached from Philadelphia
by a floating bridge, replaced by wooden telescope drawbridge built in
1808, by the P., W. & B. R. R.; stone monument, still standing, covered
with most interesting and historically valuable inscriptions, marks
opening of the first railroad to the South.
Sixty-fifth Street and Woodland Avenue, St. James’ Protestant Episcopal
Church, Kingsessing, built by the Swedes, 1762, building practically
unchanged, has interesting burial ground. Sixty-ninth Street and
Paschall Avenue is an old yellow mansion, built about 1723, home of the
Paschalls, General Howe’s headquarters after the Battle of Brandywine.
Seventieth Street and Woodland Avenue, quaint old building, the Bannaker
School, built in 1789, said to be oldest public-school building in
Philadelphia, now used in connection with the school garden.
Seventy-third Street, Blue Bell Tavern, opposite, was terminus of the
great trading path of the Minquas Indians leading from the Susquehanna;
Island Road leads to “Cannon Ball” farmhouse, below Penrose Ferry,
struck during bombardment of Fort Mifflin in 1777.
Crossing Cobb’s Creek, the southern boundary of the city, and county of
Philadelphia, we enter DELAWARE COUNTY, the oldest settled section of
Pennsylvania. DARBY, an ancient town, birthplace of John Bartram,
contains many old houses, and a Friends’ meeting house, dating from the
eighteenth century, with picturesque burying ground, where many colonial
notables lie in unmarked graves; SHARON HILL, residential suburb,
Convent of Holy Child Jesus, occupies buildings erected for John
Jackson’s Quaker School, famous in the middle of the last century; new
decorated Gothic chapel of stone. Beyond NORWOOD is the old White Horse
Hotel, now abandoned, built, 1720.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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