Whitemarsh Hall Ruins, Pt 2
I meet someone very close to the story
If you’re not familiar with my previous column about an abandoned mansion outside of Philadelphia that I had the pleasure of trespassing in 1980, you can read more below. At that time I focused on first-hand observations and a bit of history.
It was posted around Halloween time, so I played up the creepiness. And it truly felt haunted, if not by ghosts, by memories of splendor and the detritus of abuse.
In January I was hosting a lecture event in downtown Lancaster, PA that had nothing to do with Whitemarsh Hall.
Well, except that it was held in the Great Hall of The Trust Performing Arts Center, a beaux-arts mammoth of granite built as a bank in the Guilded Age and deep-sixed by the Great Depression.
Both properties share a similar grandiose history, but only one has been re-used adaptively over the decades.
At the event, as life and providence would have it, I found myself extending a cordless mic toward an audience member with a question for our speaker. She landed a good one then turned to me with a smile and handed back the mic.
A familiar face, maybe, but nothing clicked until she approached me after the Q&A and extended her own hand which was holding a book. It wasn’t Inner Excellence. That one hadn’t soared with the Eagles quite yet.
It was this one:
“Hi, I’m Nancy, and I stayed in your Airbnb six months ago!”
Ah, yes! Nancy, the Stotesbury lady with whom I swapped stories about the mansion I’ve been fascinated with since my teens. She had grown up in its shadow.
Her ties to the place are pretty song, though she never visited or joined her peers in trespassing, partying, and vandalizing. (I’m only guilty of one of those, believe me, and by the looks of the sleepy security guard it didn’t seem to matter).
The book she lent me is a family heirloom, a gift from her sister on Christmas 2006. The inscription on the title page records their intimate tie to the Stotesbury family.
Her sister states that their maternal grandfather, Arthur Clyde Laird, had been the estate’s head electrician and that he died at another Stotesbury mansion in January 1938 in Palm Beach, FL.
She also mentions that Mrs. Stotesbury, the effective COO of all three Stotesbury mansions, purchased Arthur a burial plot in Ivy Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia.
Blazing through this photo book with extended captions, several impressions inflated in me like mental and emotional angioplasties:
Questions, oh so many, about capitalism’s ability to elevate and exploit resources, people, and individual souls
Curiosity mingled with bewilderment over the lives of American magnates
Prayers arising from my longing for beauty, goodness, and truth amidst the “vanities of vanities” that is our human experience.
In Part 3 I’ll expound a bit more on these impressions while treading into the deep end of the Stotesbury story.
Maybe I’ll have a story or two from Nancy as well.
