Early baseball in Wayne – Main Line League

With one gray day succeeding another as they have so often this month, we are all doing a bit of wishful thinking along the lines of sunshiny days, with more warmth and less of dampness in the air. And with robins in everyone’s yard, and Easter but a few days off, we can say hopefully with the poet, “Ah, Wind, if Winter comes, can Spring then be far behind?”

Among other things, spring brings baseball, both of the sandlot variety and otherwise. Because of the great popularity of the game not only in professional but also in amateur circles, it is often called the national sport of the United States. Baseball really originated in this country, the final outcome of a number of similar games, particularly of town ball. Colonel Abner Doubleday (afterwards a general in the U. S. Army) has been credited as its originator since he devised the diagram of the bases and positions for players in 1839.

Wayne has always been interested in baseball, having had much to do with the Main Line League in its beginnings. In those early days probably no one was more interested in that sport locally than the late A. A. H. Canizares, one-time president of this League and for many years a baseball writer for “The Suburban” and other newspapers in this vicinity. In going over the old giles of “The Suburban,” this writer has come across some anecdotes of Mr. Canizares that should prove of interest to old-timers in the community. They may well be of interest to others than old-timers too, for Wayne’s continued participation in baseball is attested to by the games that go on almost nightly throughout the summer on the school field.

Mr. Canizares listed as the most amusing incident he could recall one that occurred when the Boroughites and Hib Steele’s Ithan team were in the midst of a hard fought struggle for the championship of the Main Line League. The “Old Fox,” as Mr. Steele was often called, was in a bad way, when his regular moundsman developed a charlie horse. Although the League was supposed to be of strictly amateur standing, it was not above paying for the services of a good player when the necessity arose. So in this emergency Mr. Steele hired “a twirler who had been beating all the sandlotters in sight,” to quote Mr. Canizares. “Hib, of course, with the other managers, had long before submitted his list of eligible players to the league secretary. There were one or two on the list who had never appeared in his lineup, and consequently, were not known to the fans. Hib proposed to substitute his twirler for one of the unknown, but unfortunately for him, he hadn’t a copy of his list with him, and couldn’t think of an eligible player’s name. As a result, the game was played under protest, and if memory serves, eventually was forfeited to Narberth.”

Another story concerns the occasion when Mr. Canizares, as president of the League, had to call a special meeting to decide whether “Lefty” Craig, a mounder of note, should play with the Wayne or the Bryn Maw team, the latter then managed by Sam Wisler, the former (according to Mr. Canizares’ best recollection) by Marc Hellner. For it seems that “Lefty” had signed with both teams! The managers of the other teams would not vote in open meeting on the question. After several such meetings, Mr. Canizares sent to each manager a secret ballot to be marked and sent to Secretary Charlie McCrea. The vote was 5 to 3 in favor of Wayne and that was where Charlie played!

Still another story concerns local baseball during World War I. So many of Wayne’s members had enlisted in various branches of the service that there were not enough left to form a team. Among the Marines stationed in a detachment near Paoli was Eddie Collins, one of the greatest second basemen the game has ever seen. He organized a team and brought it to Wayne to play out the league schedule. While the team didn’t last long, it did show the community some great baseball. And “incidentally,” Mr. Canizares wrote, “Eddie hit the longest home run ever made on the school grounds, slamming the spheroid over the tennis court in right field and ending up on Dr. Elmer’s lawn!”

And speaking of home runs, on several Wayne occasions “Cy” Cornog and “Doc” Wallace put the ball on top of the gymnasium in center field.

At the time Mr. Canizares was writing his articles, Leo Murphy, playing on the Wayne team, was considered the best outfielder who ever played along the Main Line. “He had an uncanny knack,” Mr. Canizares wrote, “of seeming to judge from the crack of the bat just where the spheroid was going to land, and he was generally on the spot. I recall him more than once hurdling the fence that used to be in deep left field and making catches that would have been impossible for the ordinary outfielder. And he had an arm of iron, throwing with uncanny accuracy right into the catcher’s mitt, and snaring at the plate many an ambitious runner trying to score from third after a putout.”

(The conclusion of this article in next week’s issue of “The Suburban” will tell of some of the men in the Main Line League who afterwards became famous in professional baseball.)

Agricultural past

Last spring when I was describing in this column Wayne as it was in the seventies and early eighties, I quoted from notes of Joseph M. Fronefield, Jr., who came here in 1881 to start a small drug store on the eastern end of Lyceum Hall. The latter was the nucleus of the large old building now standing on the northeast corner of Wayne avenue and Lancaster Pike. Mr. Fronefield had written “The surrounding country was farm land. I could look out the drug store door (it had no window on the pike) and see cattle grazing in the meadow where the business block fire house and school houses now stand.” This was part of what was known as the Siter Farm. This was but one of many farms in this vicinity, among them the Izzacki Fritz place, the Mifflin’s, the Wilds’ the George’s, the the Jones’, the Ramsey’s, the Cleaver’s, (later the Hugh’s) and others of which the writer has no written record.

Evidently the entire Main Line looked much as Wayne did, according to the quaintly worded description of it as given in the “Guide for the Pennsylvania Railroad”, printed in 1855, from which I quoted last week. In describing the route of the railroad from Philadelphia to Paoli, it says “The country through which we have passed is thickly dotted with neat farmhouses and barns, and all sorts of comfortable out-houses for pigs, and poultry, sheep, cattle and horses. The large fields of grain and grass which greet one’s eyes in the summer season, the herds of cattle, and flocks of sheep, everywhere to be seen, indicate great agricultural thrift in the inhabitants of Delaware, Montgomery and Chester Counties, thorough the luxuriant grass, are spring-houses. We may observe the patient cows standing around, with their white udders swollen with milk, waiting to yield it to the milkmaid’s pail, from which it is poured into earthen or tin pans, and those are placed in the clear cool water of those houses where the rich cream is formed for the butter.

“From these houses is taken the far-famed Philadelphia butter, superior to that, it is said, of any city in the world. The secret of its superiority lies in the green grass peculiar to this rolling country, and the cool springs that rise from its hills. No prairie land, how rich soever it may be, can ever produce butter equal to that made in the rolling counties around the city of Philadelphia.” (In this connection I recall almost the first request made by my husband’s grandmother, a woman then already in her eighties, when she visited us in Wayne many years ago. She would like to see the Chester Valley, she said, because she had heard what good butter they made there!)

Those of us who travel west along the Lancaster Pike in our automobiles nowadays are familiar with the beauty of the scene that stretches for miles before our eyes soon after we pass Paoli, “the celebrated Chester County limestone valley” as it is called in our booklet. Because of the quaint wording of that description as given almost a hundred years ago I feel it should be quoted just as it was written. Few, if any, of my readers have failed to feel the breathtaking, yet homely beauty of the valley extending as it does “easterly and westerly some 20 miles in length and averages 2 miles in width. It is skirted on both sides with high hills covered with timber, from which issue innumerable springs of pure water, converted into perpetual fountains in the valley, and affording a never-failing supply for man and beast, at the house and barn. This valley is noted for its fertility and beautiful farms. As the cars descend the hill, on an easy grade, the passenger may take in at one view many miles of this magnificent panorama, interspersed with comfortable and neat farm-houses, spacious barns, and other necessary buildings. Hundreds of fields of waving grain, the deep green corn, and luxuriant timothy and clover, pass in review before him.

“Here, the farmers may be seen driving their teams a-field, and there cattle, horses and sheep, feeding in the pasture, or reclining under the trees. This valley supplies the finest beef for the Philadelphia and New York markets. The cattle are brought, when poor, from the regions of the north and the west, and fattened here in the rich pastures of Pennsylvania. The beef of Philadelphia, like the butter, is nowhere else to be found.”

Thus was the beautiful and fertile countryside of our Main Line section a century or more ago.

“Guide for the Pennsylvania Railroad”

A quaint, little, faded book, its pages brittle with age, has recently come into my temporary possession through the courtesy of Herbert S. Casey. Printed in 1855 by T. K. and P. G. Collins, of Philadelphia, it is entitled, “Guide for the Pennsylvania Railroad, with an Extensive Map; including the Entire Route, with all its Windings, Objects of Interest, and Information Useful to the Traveler.” It is indeed an extensive map . . . its pages, too frail for this writer to dare to unfold many times, measures some two yards in length! Those two yards of map cover the route of the railroad from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Going back as it does to a period now almost one hundred years past, those entire two yards are of vast interest to the historian. But of particular interest to the writer and to her readers are the first few inches which include that part of the railroad between Philadelphia and Paoli, our own “Main Line” of the present day! The book is a first edition, and obviously very rare.

Even one hundred and more years ago, the Pennsylvania Railroad was recognized as n almost indispensable link between “the eastern or Atlantic cities and those situated on the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers”. Back in the 1830’s there seemed some doubt, however, whether the Allegheny Mountains could be passed on a direct route to Pittsburgh, without an inclined plane. In 1838, the first survey was made by William E. Morris, an engineer, while in 1841 Charles L. Schlatter was appointed by the Board of Canal Commissioners to make a full survey for a railway from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh.

Our “Guide for the Pennsylvania Railroad” relates that “The first meeting of the Citizens of Philadelphia in relation to building the road, was held at the Chinese Museum, on the 10th of December, 1842. It was an unusually large meeting, at which a determined spirit was manifested to prosecute this great work. Thomas P. Cope was called to the chair. A preamble and resolutions urging the importance of the work, were offered by William M. Meredith, and unanimously adopted. A large committee on memorials to the Legislature, praying for an act of incorporation, and a committee of nine to prepare and publish an address to the citizens of Pennsylvania, setting forth the views and objects of the meeting, were appointed.”

At this meeting, Thomas P. Cope was chosen president. He was the great-great-grandfather of Herbert S. Casey, president of our Radnor Historical Society, and long a well-known citizen of Radnor Township. Mr. Cope was a close friend of Stephen Girard and one of the executors of his famous will. Of Girard College, our “Guide” States, “it is principally composed of marble, is the grandest building in America, and the most richly endowed charitable institution, by a single individual, in the world”. Stephen Girard’s will took care of this endowment, of course. Thomas Cope was one of the three Cope brothers who organized the first group of packet ships between England and America.

As soon as the act to incorporate the Pennsylvania Railroad Company was passed on April 13, 1846, a large town meeting was called in Philadelphia for the purpose of taking measures to bring the corporation into existence. A specially appointed committee prepared an address to be issued in pamphlet form. Private and corporate subscriptions soon rose to a total of two and a half million dollars. From this meeting in April, construction of the road was authorized and begun with a charter bearing the date, April 13, 1846.

By the time the first “Guide of the Pennsylvania Railroad” was published in 1855, the line of road between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh was complete. At that time it had three owners. The State of Pennsylvania owned that part extending from the city to Dillersville, one mile above Lancaster, consisting of a double track, in length 69 miles. From Dillersville to Harrisburg, the Portsmouth Mount Joy and Lancaster Railroad took over that distance of 36 miles. The remaining 248 miles between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh was the property of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

According to our two yard map the old depot seems to have been on the Delaware River at the foot of Market street. According to the description given in 1855, “The cars are drawn from the depot by horse or mule power, out Market Street, and across the Schuylkill Permanent Bridge, at the west end of which they take the locomotive . . . After taking steam we pass up the Schuylkill in full view of the light and graceful Wire Bridge on the right, the Fairmount Water Works, and the beautiful fall of water over the Dam, as well as the placid sheet which it makes as far as the eye can reach. The new bridge at Girard Avenue may also be seen, and the Girard College, with snowy Whiteness and its magnificent marble columns and marble roof, overlooking the city and surrounding country for miles.

“The State locomotive engine house is immediately on the road to the right, a few hundred yards from the place of starting. Thence passing through a deep cut, we curve round and pursue nearly a westerly course, leaving the city and its busy multitudes behind. In rounding the curve to the left, we may observe the West Philadelphia Water Works, being a very high iron column cylinder, encircled by a neat and tasty iron stairway, winding around it from its base to its summit. At a distance of 3 miles from the depot we pass Hestonville on our left, then Libertyville, and Athensville, and arrive at White Hall, 10 miles from the city.”

Hestonville, Mr. Casey tells us, was a little village near what is now 52nd Street in Philadelphia. His grandfather, Francis Cope Yarnall, was much interested in the well-known little Episcopalian Church in this section. Libertyville is our present suburb of Narberth, while Athensville later became Ardmore. Athens Avenue still commemorates the old name. White Hall later became Bryn Mawr, although the location of the Railroad station was considerably changed from its original site near the present Bryn Mawr Hospital.

Just before arriving at White Hall “we may observe to the left”, to continue with our description of the route, “a large building with an extensive lawn, and a handsome wood between it and the railroad. This is the Haverford College, belonging to an association of Friends, and conducted by them, where a classical education may be obtained by the youth of that denomination, but which is not confined exclusively to them. This College is in Delaware County . . . we next pass on to the stations of Villa Nova (a Roman Catholic College), Morgan’s Corner, and the Eagle, and arrive at the Paoli, 20 miles on our journey. The train frequently stops here for refreshments. Near this place 150 Americans, under General Wayne, were killed and wounded on the night of the 20th of December, 1777, by a detachment of English under General Gray. This action is frequently called the Paoli Massacre”.

Villanova retains its original name, while Morgan’s Corner has now become Radnor. In regard to the name of “The Eagle”, now Strafford, the writer of this column has recently had a letter from Mrs. Charles Carrol Suffern, of Strafford, who says that since she is “over ninety-one years of age”, she can remember much of the “old set-up”. Mrs. Suffern writes, in regard to a reference to old taverns, “You tell of ‘the Eagle’ – it was known as “The Spread Eagle’, and the post office at the old Eagle Station, midway between Strafford and Devon, was also so called, taking its name from the old tavern”.

Wayne is not on this 1855 map. It may have been a little later that trains began to stop to take on milk at the Cleaver Farm, now known to most of us as the old William Wood property, recently sold as a business site. The milk stop was called “Cleaver’s Gate”, or Cleaver’s Landing”. Later this became Louella, and then Wayne. The first station was a large, square wooden pillar laid on its side where passengers sat while they waited to flag the train. An old wagon bed, which took the place of this pillar, was burned on one Fourth of July. Then a small box-like station was built with a house attached in which the ticket agent lived. J. Henry Askin, one of Wayne’s pioneers, of whom much has been written in this column, is said to have had a private waiting room in this station for his family! The original station still stands, being used now as sleeping quarters for employees of the Wayne Hotel.
(To be continued)

“The Old Main Line” part 4: Life in the “60s” – Drexel & Childs

On the way of life in the sixties in the Philadelphia suburban area, Mr. Townsend, in his book, “The Old ‘Main Line’” gives us many brief, but telling insights. Old men and young children alike wore long tail coats and stiff starched shirt bosoms in the morning as well as the evening. “At college”, our historian tells us, “the Sophs forbade the Freshmen to wear high silk hats. Imagine a youth today of any class at college wearing this doubtful ornament. . .” And at that, Mr. Townsend was writing almost thirty years ago, when dress was a little more formal than now!

In the sixties well dressed men often wore leather boots that came to their knees, and into them tucked their trousers on stormy days. For a comfortable evening at home these were replaced by canvas slippers, with “flowers worked on their tops by devoted wives or best girls”. Women’s clothes likewise were far more formal in the sixties than in later days, with wasp-like waists and sweeping trains even on the street! Food, though plentiful then as now, did not have the wide variety that greater transportation facilities and increased refrigeration has made possible. Mr. Townsend writes in nostalgic vein of the delicacies prepared by Augustine, the great Philadelphia colored caterer. He ells of a trip on a Pennsylvania Railroad private car which “was stocked as usual with Augustine’s viands . . . a noted Englishman, who had just landed to visit the Centennial Exhibition of ‘76 was one of the party that sat down to the first luncheon in the little dining room of that car . . . one delicacy after another tickled his Anglican palate as never before and turning around, he whispered, “If this is what you Americans have on a railway car, I wonder what you have at home.” Mr. Townsend slyly adds, “We did not tell him we did not always have Augustine at home.” However, regular dining cars were an unknown quantity in the sixties and seventies. On a trip of any length passengers dined at railway restaurants along the route.

Among the many things that would seem unsanitary to us of a later day were the prevalence of flies and the lack of screening in the sixties. Stables bred flies by the millions during a time when wire screens were unknown, though, according to Mr. Townsend, “a few houses had flimsy pink mosquito netting over a few windows . . . some householders had canopies of such netting over their beds, some had wire cages to cover each dish on the table, some had a mechanical fly fan in the middle of the table . . . in hotels, the colored waiters, with large palm leaf fans, kept the flies off a part of the time”.

Of medicine in the sixties, Mr. Townsend says that “homeopathy was being experimented with by many, but its small pellets were laughed at by the ‘Old School’, which was then wedded to its searching draughts”. Professional massage, or osteopathy, as it was later known, was not practiced at all in those days. No one had operations for the removal of the appendix or tonsils or adenoids, as their presence, for good or evil, was not recognized then. As Mr. Townsend states it, “If any of these things went wrong, you were blissfully ignorant of it and there was a chance of getting well, or at least of dying a natural death . . .Neither did you have to have your teeth X-rayed and yanked out.”

Telephones were not introduced until the late seventies, and did not become at all prevalent until the early eighties. Even then many hesitated to have them installed. One thing that graced practically every house, however, was the lightning rod, in fact sometimes several of them, and certainly the barn and stable had to have their share also! “The Lightning Rod man was a feature in country life”, our humorous historian tells us, “he went up and down the breadth of the land, persuading every one that life depended upon having lightning rods . . . He was succeeded in his ubiquity by the life insurance man and later by the bond salesman.”

In the absence of automobiles, cattle could safely roam the roads, and they did. Tramps did the same. It is said that cooks in some of the large houses sometimes fed a dozen or more in a day. Private chalk marks made on gate posts by these hoboes indicated “the quality of the fare or the character of the dog”. Conditions were particularly bad before and during the great railway strikes of ‘77. In one nearby Rosemont section a “Relief Association” was started by John B. Garrett when the hungry who were traversing the roads were fed. A business revival in 1879 eased the employment situation somewhat. However, some of the habitual tramps “had become so enamored of the free and easy life that they never could return to work . . . they wintered in the County Poor Houses and with the first robin, would begin their summer wanderings, sleeping in barns and empty houses and feeding at kitchen doors.” Lancaster Pike was of course the best traveled highway of all for these “knights of the road.”

Business along the Main Line in the sixties and seventies was practically non-existent. About all that was necessary was an occasional small country store and a blacksmith shop. Among these old store was the “West Haverford Store”, on the Pike in Rosemont, later occupied by Lippincott and Eadie.

To Mr. Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Main Line section owes its township government. As the Suburban communities began to get more thickly settled, he saw that some form of local government would become necessary, especially as regards police protection. And so Mr. Cassatt was instrumental in having the State legislature enact a law for the government of “Townships of the First Class” having a certain number of inhabitants. Lower Merion Township was the first to qualify while Haverford Township followed in a few years. The governing body of such townships has always been a small number of elected Commissioners. In a similar manner the affairs of township schools are in the hands of a school board elected by the voters.

Among the prominent men of the period of which we have been writing were George W. Childs, editor of the Public Ledger, and Anthony J. Drexel, a prominent stockholder in that newspaper and one of the wealthiest men of his time. It was these two men who founded the town of Wayne as a real estate operation. When Mr. Childs was asked one day, according to our historian, why they built their new town so far up the road, when there were numerous properties just as available nearer to Philadelphia, he quickly replied that it was “in order to give the new settlers more time to read the Ledger on the train!” Mr. Childs lived on a large property on Bryn Mawr avenue which was then a new road that had just been laid out southward from Whitehall. His place was called “Wootton”, and because Mr. Childs’ “Herat was as big as his house”, it became “Welcome Hall” for all visitors, whether of distinction or otherwise.

Among other early famous men and large property owners of the Main Line were John Converse, who built his mansion on the Pike at Rosemont; Samuel Vauclain, president of Baldwin Locomotive Works, who built near the Converse place, and T. Wilson Brown, who settled in Villanova. The latter had a large part in the founding and the maintenance of the Bryn Mawr Hospital.

Among many other names mentioned by Mr. Townsend is that of a man well known in our community, since up to the time of his recent death, A. J. County made his home here. Coming to this country as a young Irish lad, he became associated with the Pennsylvania Railroad, eventually becoming one of its vice-presidents.

“The Old Main Line” part 3: Bryn Mawr in the “60s” – PRR, Baldwin School

We have noted before in this column that the Pennsylvania Railroad ran considerably to the south of its present right of way, in what was later the Bryn Mawr section. At one time it stopped right at Whitehall Hotel, which was directly across the present Glenbrook avenue from the old Bryn Mawr Hospital building. Later the railroad built a station a few yards further west of Whitehall, which to this day forms the nucleus of the Bryn Mawr Thrift Shop building. The tracks were originally located here because, according to Mr. Townsend’s book on “The Old Main Line’”, the railway “took the easiest courses around hills, or swerved here and there to suit some politician’s pleasure, having been built by the State.”

In the late sixties, however, the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to eliminate the long detour past Whitehall Hotel. But when they found it necessary to make a deep cut through the high ground covering the proposed cut-off, neighboring farmers claimed heavy damages for the right of way. And so the railroad decided to buy the large tract of ground which later proved to be the beginning of the suburb of Bryn Mawr. It included nearly all the land between Penn street, Gulph road, Roberts road and the present railway tracks. This they plotted into building lots and to make it exclusively residential, “all the deeds of sale prohibited all manufactures, stores, shops, livery stables or buildings for any offensive occupation.”

It is interesting to note that the Baldwin School started on the northwest corner of Morris and Montgomery avenues in a double frame house, originally built by the railroad with the idea that the purchasers of their lots would reside there while their own homes were being built. Later this house was much increased in size and became the “Lancaster Inn”. Another building erected by the railroad was the Bryn Mawr Hotel, to which many aristocratic Philadelphia families came in the summer. Within a few years’ time the original hotel was burned to the ground, whereupon a neighborhood syndicate built a new one at the cost of a half million dollars. After the foreclosure of the mortgage on this building it was rented to the Baldwin School.

Compared to the grounds now around the School the surroundings of the hotel were quite unattractive, for in the front of it were two large ice ponds fed by a small stream. Although these were merely mud holes in dry weather, it was necessary to have them, since the country in the sixties and seventies depended on ponds for ice. The hotel building itself boasted gas lights and bath tubs, the latter to the extent of only one on each floor for the use of about fifty people!

“Country summering” was becoming increasingly popular with city folks, as indicated by a small prospectus issued by the Railway Company in 1874, when it listed 54 boarding houses from Overbook to Downingtown with accommodations for 1330 guests, exclusive of the Bryn Mawr Hotel, which held 250. The largest of these houses was “Summit Grove”, a frame building on the south side of Bryn Mawr Station with a capacity of about 80 boarders. Its memory has been preserved in the name Summit Grove avenue.

“The Main Line showed the first symptoms of getting gay”, writes Mr. Townsend, “when the hotel got well under way in its second summer of 1873. The Bryn Mawr Assemblies’ were the events of the season and were run by George Kimball . . . about 500 people attended each of these ‘assemblies’. Other entertainments of the summer were a magic lantern exhibition by Will Struther, a comic talk by Benjamin Franklin Duane, a Mock Trial, and an Orpheus Club concert. This was soon after the Club started forty-six years ago* . . . It is curious to consider that these functions continued through the whole of hot summers . . . Philadelphians had not yet acquired the expensive and unnatural habit of seeking distant climbs for cold in summer as well as for heat in winter.

Mr. Townsend’s account continues, “The hotel life was quite similar to that of the old boarding houses, only it was gayer and more formal . . . In the afternoons nearly everyone drove or rode. Cavalcades of perhaps twenty-five riders would go out together and explore the country roads for miles around. Women and girls used only side saddles; bifurcated riding would have been looked upon with horror. The Radnor Hunt had not started and little hunting or jumping was indulged in. The roads were all dirt roads except Lancaster Pike, which was very rough and ridgey, without any smooth surfacing. The dirt roads were fine for horseback, but became a foot deep in mud when it rained, and in winter were almost impassable. The old Haverford road that ran through the Whitehall district was then a ‘plank road’, that is, one-half of it had heavy boards laid close together, unpleasant to ride on but a great boon in muddy weather”.

When the Bryn Mawr tract was laid out, its avenues were covered with a coarse gravel which made for very slow travel. These roads exasperated Mr. Cassatt, vice-president of the railroad, who was fond of driving his four-in-hand coach. He accepted the position of township road supervisor and was instrumental in obtaining macadamized roadbeds. He also got a company of his friends to buy Lancaster Pike as far as Paoli and to make a macadamized road of it. Toll was charged to keep it in order and “it was a great boon” to the driving public for many years. In later years the toll gates were abolished when the State bought the PIke and maintained it by taxes.

The Railway Company gave its new village the name of Bryn Mawr from the home of Rowland Ellis, who in Colonial times settled the tract on Gulph road opposite where Bryn Mawr College now stands. Mr. Ellis had brought the name from his old home in Wales. The old town of Humphreysville, consisting of a few dwellings on Lancaster Pike, also took the name of Bryn Mawr. Mr. Townsend, writing in 1922, says “there are now several thousand residents using the station, from the Schuylkill hills on the north to Newtown Square on the south. All of this territory calls itself Bryn Mawr, while the girls’ college which soon started in the new settlement seems to think the name belongs to it exclusively!”

So much for the interesting early history of a section of the Main Line, a large section of which lies in Radnor Township and is therefore an integral part of “Your Town and My Town”. For all that part of Bryn Mawr south of County Line road between Gulph road and Coopertown road (now known as Llandover road) is part of our township.

(to be continued)

*Mr. Townsend dates the beginning of the Orpheus Club 46 years before 1922.