Lost and Found
Written by PA Heritage Staff in the Lost and Found category and the Winter 2000 issue Topics in this article: architecture and architects, Detroit, Edward T. Stotesbury, Elijah Barnum, French, Lehigh County, Montgomery County, New York, Philadelphia, Slatington, Whitemarsh HallLost
Rivaling the fabled “cottages” of Newport, Rhode Island, Whitemarsh Hall, built between 1916 and 1921 in Wyndmoor, Montgomery County, for banker Edward T. Stotesbury, contained one hundred and forty-seven rooms. The estate, totaling more than three hundred acres, was jointly conceived by prominent Philadelphia architect Horace Trumbauer and French landscape designer Jacques Greber. The pair sited a colossal Georgian-style manor house in an idyllic seventeenth-century French landscape garden, which statesman Georges Clemenceau hailed as the “Versailles of America.” Greber’s elaborate formal gardens featured classical statuary, follies, reflecting pools, and fountains. After being ravaged by vandals for nearly twenty years, Whitemarsh Hall was demolished in 1980 for a housing development.
Found
Erected in 1909, the Fireman’s Drinking Fountain in SlatingÂton was also outfitted with a horse trough and a basin for dogs. The monument, measuring twelve feet high, is unusual because it does not memorialize the dead, but instead honors the living. The public drinking fountain was purchased from E. T. Barnum and Company, of Detroit, and the statue was cast by the J. W. Fiske Iron Works, New York. The purchase price was seven hundred dollars. The monument was damaged by an automobile in the early 1940s, and again in 1979, when a hit-and-run driver struck it, toppling the statue and separating its head from its badly damaged body. Residents rallied and raised the necessary funds for its restoration. At night, the fireman’s lantern burns brightly as testimony to the Leigh County community’s civic pride.
