All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #038:  Through the Looking Glass – Some Lewis Carrol Connections, part 1

Eldridge Reeves Johnson made millions of dollars with his Victor  Talking Machine Company. Some of it he used to purchase the original Lewis Carroll manuscript of Alice from bookseller extraordinaire A.S.W. Rosenbach.  He kept the manuscript on his yacht.

• Industrialist Eldridge Reeves Johnson used money from the millions he earned in developing the Victor Talking Machine Company and purchased the original copy of “Alice’s Adventures Underground,” lettered and drawn by the author himself.

Biographical Bytes from Bala: Laurel Hill West Stories #007

Francis Xavier Dercum grew up in Philadelphia and trained as a neurologist.  When President Woodrow Wilson had his massive stroke in 1919, Dercum was called in as consultant.  Years later when Wilson's widow Edith wrote her memoirs, she insisted that it was Dr. Dercum who had encouraged her to run things while he recovered.

Francis's sister Clara Dercum also became a physician and spent much of her career giving charity care to the poor in Philadelphia, while working tirelessly for women's rights.  

Their half-sister Susanna Dercum went in a different direction and became Leopold Stokowski's choice for the voice of Maria Aegyptica when he conducted the American premier of Mahler's 8th Symphony in 1916. 

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The baby of the group Francis Penrose had a mental breakdown in his teens and became a lifelong resident of an upper-class psychiatric hospital, but his legacy has been embellished all over the web by someone claiming to be his niece.

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #037 Boies Will Be Boys – The Penrose Brothers, part 3

Richard Alexander Fullerton Penrose Jr., named after his father, became a geologist and surveyed some of the great precious metal reserves in the American west.  His will left millions of dollars to organizations which are in existence today because of him.

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #037 Boies Will Be Boys – The Penrose Brothers, part 2

Charles Penrose was the only person with better grades than brother Boies in their Harvard class.  He became a respected surgeon and gynecologist and brought the practice of surgery forward with his methods, along with leaving his name on a commonly used device.  But his one-on-one battle with an enraged bear is legendary.  

Tucked away in Laurel Hill South near the border with Fairmount Park is a family plot that – foot for foot – may have more interesting people than anyplace else in the cemetery.  

• Boies Penrose was the second smartest man in his class at Harvard, became a representative from Philadelphia to Harrisburg and speaker of the house before moving to Washington D.C. as State Senator where he spent the rest of his life.

Plus, stories about political corruption in Philadelphia, gluttony, the Johnson County Range Wars, and a bizarre theory about the sinking of the R.M.S. Titanic.  

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Hannah Clothier Hull, daughter of a department store magnate, was a suffragette and a leader in the Women’s Peace Movement for more than 50 years.  She was the wife of one of the great Quaker historians and peace activists William Isaac Hull.  They both lived a Life for Peace. 

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Three Victorian Philadelphia sisters helped make Philadelphia what it is today. 

• The oldest Mary Channing Wister petitioned for music in the public schools, more public parks for all, and placement of the Broad Street line underground.

All three of these women are buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery.  I tell their stories today. 

Raymond Pace Alexander was born in Philadelphia to former enslaved people but graduated with honors from Harvard Law School and became the go-to civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia.  In 1959, he became the first black judge to sit on the Court of Common Pleas. 

His wife Sadie Tanner Mossell came from a pioneering middle-class family and was the first Black women to earn an economics degree in the US, but then also became a lawyer. 

Together they spent their lives battling racism in Philadelphia.