Woodford Mansion 1758

Fairmount Park East, Philadelphia, PA

Judge William Coleman had a single-story house built in the Georgian style and completed in 1758. Coleman was a Quaker, born in Philadelphia and close friends with Benjamin Franklin. Woodford sits on the edge of East Fairmount Park, near Ridge Avenue and 33rd Street, and accessible in the park from Randolph Street.

The second floor, with a beautiful Palladian window, was added about 1772 by David Franks who lived there as an employee of the English Crown. After the British occupation of Philadelphia ended in 1777, the infamous Benedict Arnold was assigned to arrest him for treason. Franks and his family were forced to move with other Torys to New York.((HABS PA-1307 ))

Woodford changed hands until it was purchased in 1793 by by Isaac Wharton (1745-1808), who put a new kitchen addition at the back of the house. Isaac married Margaret Rawle who spent summers with her family at the nearby Laurel Hill villa. This influential Philadelphia family used the mansion as a summer residence until the Civil War. Isaac’s brother Charles Wharton (1743–1838) owned Bellevue Mansion in North Philadelphia on Nicetown Avenue (now the site of a playground across from the Tastycake factory). Charles is the grandfather of industrialist Joseph Wharton who founded the business school at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founded Bethlehem Steel company. ((“Wharton Family Papers” The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Collection 708A (2006) ))

Fairmount Park acquired the property in 1868 and the building was used over the next 60 years as park offices and traffic court. Woodford Mansion has been operated as a historic house museum since 1930 when Naomi Wood and Daniel Huntoon donated their collection of “Colonial household gear” and antique furniture for permanent display. The Naomi Wood Trust funded the original restoration and continuing maintenance of the mansion and the carriage house.((Woodford website ))

A Closer Look at the Schuylkill River Valley and the Rise of the "Villa"

In the 1760s, a section of the Schuylkill River valley was the scene of concentrated villa-building activity. The area lay east of the river, within the Northern Liberties, and its dense foliage, high bluffs and impressive views must have attracted urbanites’ attention at an early date. Subdivision served as the catalyst for development. In 1753, Quaker merchant Joshua Fisher purchased roughly 53 acres of a 270-acre tract that had belonged to the Mifflin family since Penn’s division of the “liberty lands.” Underscoring the landscape’s suitability for villa construction, Fisher went on to build The Cliffs on his property, naming it after his grandfather’s English estate.

Of greater consequence to the area’s character was a series of real estate transactions that began in 1754 after the death of Thomas Shute. During the late seventeenth century, Dennis Rotchford created a 200-acre estate by consolidating lands that William Penn had granted to others, and since 1707 it had been in Shute’s possession. The estate formed a promontory known as Edgerlie or Edgeley Point, and Shute used it as a farm, conditionally bequeathing it to his son Joseph. When, in 1754, Joseph failed to meet the terms of his father’s will, Abel James bought the property from the elder Shute’s executors. Joseph managed to buy back the family farm two years later, but his creditors soon forced him to relinquish it.

Federal style fireplace overmantel (photo: chrisstorb on Flickr)

Twice the land was exposed to public sale, and by the Fall of 1760 it had been divided among five individuals: William Coleman, Benjamin Mifflin, Joseph Galloway, Joshua Howell and the well-traveled FrancisRawle. Most of these men were associated through friendship or business but three of them were also related to Thomas Shute’s executor, Edward Warner. As Coleman’s brother-in- law, and father-in-law to both Howell and Rawle, Warner represented a significant link between houses that stood or arose along Edgley Point Lane. Coleman erected Woodford in 1756, Rawle’s widow (Warner’s daughter) Rebecca built Laurel Hill around 1767, and Howell inhabited Edgeley, the old Shute homestead, with Warner’s daughter Katherine.

Rebecca Rawle represented another crucial connection between villa-dwellers. Upon her husband Francis’s death in 1761, she inherited what had once been John Smith’s rural retreat, Point-no-Point (see above). The latter was the scene of Francis’s demise, and perhaps this explains Rebecca’s decision to establish her own country seat at Laurel Hill. Samuel Shoemaker, a Quaker merchant, lawyer, and politician, married her in 1767, adding a Germantown villa to the family’s holdings. In 1797, her son William bought Harleigh, an estate close to his friend William Lewis’s Summerville (later Strawberry Mansion). The Summerville property, in turn, bordered Woodford, which William Rawle’s sister Margaret and her husband Isaac Wharton had acquired in 1793.

Throughout much of her life, Rebecca Rawle documented the constant interaction of the villa-dwellers in her diary, clearly demonstrating that “country” living was exclusive not reclusive in nature. It was an opportunity to associate with one’s peers while displaying that badge of wealth, “social arrival” and cosmopolitan Anglophilia: the villa. ((“Schuylkill River Villas Fairmount Park, Philadelphia” HABS PA-6184 (1995):9 ))

Resources

Woodford Mansion National Historic Landmark – official website
33rd & Dauphin Streets
East Fairmount Park,
Philadelphia, PA 19132
(215) 229-6115