Stenton's "period of interpretation"
is 1730-1830, with emphasis on the first three generations of Logans
who lived there in the 18th century, when the surrounding area consisted
of relatively large landholdings interspersed with smaller, subsistence
farms. This pattern generally prevailed until the railroad came in 1832.
First Generation: In
1714, James Logan began to purchase land that would eventually total more
than 500 acres in the "Liberty Lands" between the City of Philadelphia
and the German Township. He named the plantation (i.e., a large farm that
was intended to produce income) "Stenton", after the family estate in
Scotland. The house was entirely complete by 1730, and remained his primary
residence until his death in 1751. James Logan was a botanist, communicating
his observations on the sexual reproduction of Indian corn to the Royal
Society.
Second Generation: James's older son William (1718-1776), maintained the
property as a country seat rather than a full-time residence. William
and his wife Hannah died just before the Revolution, having sent their
sons off to Edinburgh to study medicine, and endowed their daughter Sally
and her husband Thomas Fisher with a substantial acreage in the northern
part of the plantation. William was a horticulturalist, ordering many
exotic plants from the American south.
Third Generation:
After his return to the newly fledged United States, William's son George
moved to Stenton with his bride Deborah (Norris) in 1781 and made it their
full-time residence. Stenton became a model farm, since George was particularly
interested in progressive agriculture, and a vocal proponent of agrarianism
in its early republican rhetorical guise as an avenue to national self-sufficiency.
George Logan lived at Stenton until his death in 1820; Deborah continued
there until her own death almost twenty years later.
The Philadelphia, Germantown, and Norristown Railroad (PG&N), the first in the region, was completed to Norristown in 1835. Thomas Fisher, George and Deborah Logan's brother-in-law, was responsible for locating the track between Stenton and his own property, Wakefield, to Deborah's great distress, since the tracks were raised above Germantown Avenue and the trestle and later embankment became a significant feature of the Stenton landscape and forever impinged on its pastoral appearance.
During Deborah's long widowhood
we begin to find written descriptions of the Stenton landscape. In contrast
to glowing reports on other great houses such as Bush Hill or Springettsbury,
the most reliable 19th century published sources are conspicuously quiet
on the subject of an ornamental garden at Stenton, particularly in the
18th century. John Fanning Watson mentions no garden at Stenton but remarks
that "at one time the fields were cultivated in tobacco".
Watson does, however, express
a strong emotional response to the house and grounds, approaching "the
secluded shades of Stenton, in which [James Logan] sought retirement from
the cares and concerns of public life, with such emotions as might inspire
poetry or soothe and enlarge the imagination." The association of
an idea or value with a place, intimately associated with the self-conscious
process of nation building, was in full swing, and by 1830 Stenton had
become a "picturesque" site connected with American, especially Pennsylvanian,
history. One suspects that Deborah had a hand in this.
Fourth Generation:
Albanus Charles, (1783-1854) the only child of George and Deborah Logan
to survive his parents, inherited Stenton on his mother's death, although
he and his family seem to have moved in some years earlier. After Albanus'
death, his widow, Maria Dickinson Logan, a woman of considerable wealth
in her own right, lived on at Stenton for several years. One of the best
19th century descriptions comes to us from a Logan descendant, the idiosyncratic
and opinionated Sidney George Fisher. In August, 1860, he visited Cousin
Maria and noted: The legend was building towards completion, and just
in time, for the next two generations of Logans were to leave this ancestral
property to return to another, and then disappear from the American scene.
Fifth Generation:
Albanus and Maria had several children; their oldest son Gustavus George
(1815-1876) inherited the property and used the house as a summer residence.
He married Anna Armatt of Loudoun, nearby on Germantown Avenue at the
top of Naglee's Hill. Saddened by a very unhappy marriage, she and their
children - Albanus, Maria, Frances, and Jane - moved back to Loudoun shortly
after the Civil War.
The PG&N railroad had already
had a strong effect on access to Germantown and adjacent areas, and completely
altered their character. As development, both industrial and residential,
increased, Gustavus George subdivided the property. Germantown had always
been a center of manufacturing, and the rail line became an increasingly
densely built spine of large industrial buildings, especially around Wayne
Junction, as other railroads, either established or taken over by the
Reading, passed through this hub.
When the original Germantown
line was extended to Chestnut Hill in the middle of the nineteenth century,
both towns developed into commuting suburbs. The former German Township
- Germantown, Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill - remained a largely residential
zone well into the twentieth century, and significant portions have continued
so to the present. To the south and east of Stenton, the residential and
industrial development of North Philadelphia grew, particularly after
the Civil War. As the decades passed, densely built row houses interspersed
with factories along the rail lines, seemed to march inexorably north,
with Broad Street as one of the major arteries.
Sixth Generation: Gustavus George and Anna Armatt had four children, but
only the youngest, Jane Caroline, produced heirs. She married a distant
English connection, Edward Luxmoore, and emigrated to England. Their grandchildren
and great grandchildren (eighth and ninth generations, all living in England)
are the only remaining representatives of the line of Logans that actually
lived at Stenton.
By 1888 the property had
shrunk to the block bounded by North 18th Street, Windrim Avenue, West
Wyoming Avenue, North 16th Street, and Courtland Street. In 1891, the
surviving children of Gustavus George and Anna Armatt deeded the eastern
two-thirds of this block to the City of Philadelphia in order to protect
the family graveyard, which was located east of the house and its outbuildings.
The City proposed to run Wyoming Avenue through the graveyard, but reconfigured
it to the north in exchange for the property. (Even so, during the 1950's
the City paved the graveyard over, with no notification.) At some point
between 1891 and 1900, the rectangle just to the south of the Stenton
property, with a 50' frontage on 18th Street, was also deeded to Stenton
Park.
In 1909, the City purchased
the remaining three acres with the house and outbuildings for the substantial
sum of $70,225 and contracted with The National Society of Colonial Dames
of America in The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to maintain and operate
it as "an historic object lesson."
This article by Lil Chance
was broadly based on Stenton Colonial Revivial Garden 1910-1917 Cultural
Landscape Inventory by Emily Cooperman, Ph.D. 2000
Part
2 - Letitia Wright's Colonial Gardens
