Enjoy these photos of what we today know as a Goddard School at 95 Crestline Road in Wayne (Strafford). This was Cramond. My friend Michael Morrison at The Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society gave me special permission to share. I had asked if they had any photos of when this was an active estate.
Cramond is a historic home located in Tredyffrin Township, Chester County. It was a project of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White in the “Classical Revival” style.
It was built in 1886, and is a 2 1⁄2-story, six-bay half-timbered dwelling sided in clapboard. It has a hipped roof with a pair of hipped dormers and two large brick chimneys. It has been used as a daycare/educational facility for years at this point.
Click here to check out the application submitted in the 1980s by the Chester County Historical Society in order for the house to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. The Cramond- Newhall house is also on the 2003 historic resource survey of Tredyffrin Township. However should it be said that even when municipalities perform historic resource surveys it does not mean there are historic preservation ordinances in effect?
Cramond was built for Pennsylvania Railroad magnate Daniel Newhall. A segue to Mr. Newhall would be one of his daughters. Marian Newhall Horowitz O’Brien.
That is the fun thing about history. You start on one path, and sometimes it ends up taking you some place unexpected!
Ms. Magazine Blog 100 Years Ago, The South Elected Its First Woman Mayor
July 17, 2017 by Erika Waters
In 1916, 33-year-old widow Marian Newhall Horwitz made the difficult decision to leave her affluent Philadelphia life behind and move to frontier Florida. Her husband had planned an agricultural venture there and although he had died suddenly, she intended to continue in his place.
She soon found herself and her young son on a 2000-acre farm in the northern Everglades, near Lake Okeechobee, far from Florida’s burgeoning coastal cities with fashionable tourist hotels and six-story “skyscrapers.” She grew corn, beans, cabbages and especially potatoes, which particularly thrived in the muck there. Only recently had farming started in the region, for this was primarily the land of cattle ranches and Florida cowboys. Barbed wire fences stretched for miles along unpaved, dusty roads, and cattle drives ran right through Okeechobee, the largest city.
Also see:
The Memorials of Acadia National Park J. J. O’Brien and His Jesuit Settlement Memorial
In 1952 a summer resident of Seal Harbor, ME named John Joseph O’Brien (1882-1971) mounted a bronze plaque on a granite cliff in his “Sea Bench” estate garden and invited garden tours to visit and enjoy it. The memorial commemorated the first settlement of Europeans on Mount Desert Island, ME and the introduction of Christianity to the island in 1613….O’Brien, a Philadelphian and a University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate (1908), was a journalist, industrialist, entrepreneur and politician from Grosse Pointe Farms, MI. Upon graduation he entered newspaper work, but he resigned as city editor of the Philadelphia Ledger in 1914 to go to Florida and develop agricultural land. In 1917 in Hillsborough County (Tampa), FL he married Philadelphian Marian Newhall Horwitz (1882-1932), the widow of Philadelphia attorney George Horwitz, and daughter of Daniel Newhall, vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He and Marian lived in Moore Haven on the southwest side of Lake Okeechobee. There they formed the Southern Sugar Corp., later reorganized as the U.S. Sugar Corp., the country’s largest producer of cane sugar, and established the town of Clewiston, “America’s Sweetest Town.”
Marian was elected mayor of Moore Haven, a.k.a. “Little Chicago” from its location on Lake Okeechobee, and became the first woman mayor in the South. She also was president of the Moore Haven bank. By 1924 he and Marian had sold their land holdings and left the area. In 1925, while a Palm Beach resident, O’Brien purchased “Guy’s Cliff,” a 6-acre waterfront estate in Bar Harbor that today is the site of the College of the Atlantic’s Kaelber Hall. Marian died in their Grosse Pointe Farms home and is buried with her son and sister in St. David’s Episcopal Church cemetery, Wayne, PA…..
Also visit:
This is the house where John grew up. It’s located about 2 miles from Brick House 319. It was designed by the prominent architect Charles Follen McKim of the influential architectural firm McKim, Mead & White in NYC.
The three architects defined the look of the gilded age in the late 19th century and at the turn of the 20th century; they designed some of the country’s greatest buildings, most were concentrated in New York and New England. They were the most famous and successful American architectural firm of its time. Until 1887, the firm excelled in designing large homes built of shingles in Newport, Rhode Island, Long Island and the Jersey Shore….John’s father who was an attorney, bought the house in 1954 and sold it in 1983. John grew up in the house until the age of 23; he had fun living in such a great, big house.
