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Letitia Street House
Letitia Street House, in its original location.
Map
Alternative namesRising Sun Inn
Woolpack Hotel
General information
TypeResidential
Architectural styleGeorgian
LocationOriginal location:
Letitia Street &
Black Horse Alley,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Current location:

Lansdowne Drive,
West Fairmount Park,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Country United States
CoordinatesOriginal location:
39°56′56.7″N 75°8′35.3″W / 39.949083°N 75.143139°W / 39.949083; -75.143139 (Original location of Letitia Street House)

Current location:

39°58′31″N 75°11′49″W / 39.97528°N 75.19694°W / 39.97528; -75.19694 (Present location of Letitia Street House)
Completedca. 1713
Relocated1883
Renovated1932
OwnerThomas Chalkley (1715)[2]
Height
Height38 ft (11.6 m) with chimney
Roof34 ft (10 m)
Dimensions
Other dimensionsWidth 20.25 ft (6.17 m)
Depth 30 ft (9.1 m)
Design and construction
Architect(s)John Smart, carpenter
(attributed)[1]
Renovating team
Architect(s)Fiske Kimball (1932)

Letitia Street House is a modest eighteenth century house in West Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Built in Old City about 1713, it was relocated to its current site in 1883. Once thought to have been the city residence of William Penn, it is now known that he never lived there.

History

Letitia Street House, in West Fairmount Park.

King Charles II granted William Penn a royal charter for a 26-million-acre (110,000 km2) tract of land – west of New Jersey and north of Maryland – on which to develop an English colony.[3] Penn and a group of Quaker families arrived at the Philadelphia settlement in October 1682. He and his wife, Gulielmas Springetts (1644–1696), had left their four children behind in England, and stayed in America for less than two years. By the time of Penn's second visit to Pennsylvania, Gulielmas and six of their eight children had died. He arrived in 1799 with his surviving daughter Letitia (1678–1745), and his second wife, Hannah Callowhill (1671–1726), who gave birth to their son John in the colony. Penn again stayed for two years before returning to England, never to see Pennsylvania again.

During his first visit, Penn began construction of a country house along the Delaware River, more than 20 miles outside the city. He had reserved a prime piece of Philadelphia real estate for himself – a full city block bounded by High (Market), Front (1st), Chestnut and 2nd Streets – close to the waterfront and beside the market.[a] Prior to his 1701 departure, he deeded the northern half of this to his daughter Letitia, who returned with him to England, and married there in 1702. She sent instructions that the property be divided into lots and sold. Letitia Street, which cut through the Philadelphia block, was named for her.

In his Annals of Philadelphia (1830), antiquarian John Fanning Watson argued that the two-and-a-half-story brick house at Letitia Street and Black Horse Alley had been William Penn's city residence during his 1882-84 visit.[5] Identical claims had been made for two other buildings nearby, but Watson refuted these with a circumstantial case. The matter seemed all but settled by 1846, when Granville John Penn (1802–1867), William Penn's great-grandson, visited Philadelphia and was guest of honor at a reception held at the Letitia Street house.[6]

Interior, prior to 1883 relocation.

Nearly 10 million people visited the 1876 Centennial Exposition, the first American World's Fair, mounted in West Fairmount Park.[7] In his Centennial guidebook, Thompson Westcott went further than Watson, presenting (what he thought was)[b] documentary evidence that the Letitia Street House was "the oldest house in Philadelphia," and had been "the first house which was built in the city."[9] Westcott expanded this case in his next book, arguing that the house's construction "must have been commenced before Penn's arrival [in 1682]."[10] It was well documented that Penn had rented the Slate Roof House as his city residence during the 1699-1701 second visit — John Penn was born there. But despite that building's direct associations with the Penn family and Pennsylvania's colonial government, and despite desperate calls by antiquarians to preserve it, the Slate Roof House was demolished in 1867. Every other building associated with Penn, including his country house, also had been demolished. As the two-hundredth anniversary of Pennsylvania's 1682 founding approached, there was a desire to honor Penn with a monument. The Letitia Street House became that monument.

The Bi-Centennial Association of Pennsylvania was formed to raise funds through subscription to relocate the house, and to organize a week-long anniversary celebration for October 1882.[11] The parades, historical pageants, athletic events (including a regatta on the Schuylkill River), concerts and fireworks went on as scheduled,[12] but relocation of the house wasn't begun until June 1883, with restoration completed in October.[13]

The house was again restored, 1931-32, overseen by Fiske Kimball, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.[c] His historical research debunked Watson's and Westcott's conjectures about when the house had been built — Kimball dated it "after 1703 and before 1715."[d] PMA took on administration of the house, operating it as a small museum exhibiting Queen Anne furniture and decorative arts objects.[16] In 1940, the WPA guidebook to Pennsylvania concluded: "Although believed at one time to be the dwelling erected for William Penn in 1682, it was learned later that the town house of William Penn was a frame structure destroyed long ago."[17] The house museum closed in 1965.

The house served as headquarters for the Wildlife Preservation Trust in the 1990s, but has been vacant since. Isolated atop a small hill opposite the Philadelphia Zoo, it is a frequent target for vandals. In 2012, Philadelphia designated $600,000 in its capital budget for the building's restoration.[18]

In 1991, a near-replica of the Letitia Street House was built in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.[19]

Measured drawings

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Penn donated the southern half of the block as the site for the Bank Friends Meeting House (built c. 1685).[4]
  2. ^ Gabriel Thomas was one of Pennsylvania's first English residents. He arrived at Philadelphia in 1681, a year prior to William Penn, and "resided there about Fifteen Years." He was the author of An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and Country of Pensilvania and West-New-Jersey in America, published in London in 1696. Thomas wrote, "I saw the first Cellar when it was digging for the use of our Governour Will. Penn."[8]
    Writing nearly 180 years later, Westcott concluded that Thomas had been describing the cellar of the Letitia Street House, and that its construction was begun prior to Penn's 1682 arrival. But Thomas did not name the building, its location (other than Pennsylvania), or when he saw it. The cellar he described could have been that of Penn's country house, Pennsbury Manor (begun ca. 1683, completed ca. 1686).
  3. ^ Kimball would have welcomed the opportunity to correct the historical record. Ten years earlier, in his Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (1922), he had repeated Watson's and Westcott's conjectures that the Letitia Street House dated from 1682–1683.[14]
  4. ^ Kimball noted that the May 3/4, 1703 indenture of release – the real estate contract selling Letitia Penn Aubrey's lot – listed no buildings on it. The 1715 cutoff date he argued based on stylistic ground.[15]

References

  1. ^ Richard J. Webster, Philadelphia Preserved, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), p. 235.
  2. ^ "Letitia Street House," Preservation Matters (newsletter), Winter 2010, (PDF), Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia.
  3. ^ Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, ed., Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth, Penn State University Press, 2002, p. 59. ISBN 0-271-02213-2
  4. ^ Bank Meeting House, from Haverford College.
  5. ^ John Fanning Watson, "Penn's Cottage in Laetitia Court," Annals of Philadelphia, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: 1830, reprinted 1870), pp. 158-62.
  6. ^ Kenneth Finkel, "Letitia Street House relocated," Philadelphia Then and Now, (Courier Corporation, 1988), pp. 106-07.
  7. ^ Nicholas Wainwright, Russell Weigley, and Edwin Wolf II, eds., Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, (W.W. Norton & Company, 1982), pp. 467-68. ISBN 0-393-01610-2
  8. ^ Gabriel Thomas, An Historical and Geographical Account of the Province and Country of Pensilvania and West-New-Jersey in America, (London: A. Baldwin, 1696), p. 51.[1]
  9. ^ Thompson Westcott, "Penn's Mansion, Letitia Court," The Official Guide Book to Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1875), pp. 321-22.
  10. ^ Thompson Westcott, "Penn's Cottage," The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia, (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1877), p. 14.
  11. ^ David Glassberg, "Public Ritual and Cultural Hierarchy, Philadelphia's Civic Celebrations at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 107, no. 3 (July 1983), pp. 426-28.(PDF)
  12. ^ There's a Party Going on Right Here: Philadelphia Civic Celebrations, from Philadelphia City Archives.
  13. ^ Joseph Jackson, Market Street, Philadelphia; The Most Historic Highway in America, (Philadelphia: The Public Ledger Company, 1914 ), p. 17.[2]
  14. ^ Fiske Kimball, Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), pp. 41, 48, 265, 289.[3]
  15. ^ Fiske Kimball, "The Letitia Street House," The Pennsylvania Museum Bulletin, vol. 27, no. 148 (May 1932), pp. 147-52.
  16. ^ "Our Story: 1930 – 1940," from Philadelphia Museum of Art.
  17. ^ "The Letitia Street House," Pennsylvania; a Guide to the Keystone State, (Writers' Program of the Works Progress Administration, 1940), p. 285.
  18. ^ Ryan Briggs, "City chugging away on Letitia Street House restoration," Philadelphia City Paper June 24, 2013.
  19. ^ "Recreating William Penn's Home," from The Tapco Group.
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