Cedar Grove: a Quaker farmhouse near Philadelphia

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1994 by Jack L. Lindsey

In 1843 William Fisher observed the importance of ancestry in the households of many Philadelphians, writing:

The domiciles of the older merchant families are memorials to the first days of the town, and one is wise not to forget the present year during their visitations. Their homes are often those of a relative long absent, but with parts maintained as if they had taken only a short repose from the place. An ancient chair, or rendered likeness is proudly displayed and cherished, preferred above decorations in the latest fashions.(1)

Cedar Grove, a summer residence maintained by five generations of the Paschalls and Morrises, prominent Philadelphia Quaker families, illustrates such sentiments most poignantly.

The house, built between 1748 and 1750 and enlarged in later years, descended matrilineally through a series of intermarriages within several extended families. In 1926 Cedar Grove was presented to the city of Philadelphia by Lydia Thompson Morris, to whom it had descended. The house was moved at that time to the city's Fairmount Park. Miss Morris, who lived in the house until 1888, was an avid antiquarian and with her brother John she had accumulated and preserved a large and important group of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century furnishings used at Cedar Grove by their ancestors. She gave these furnishings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has been responsible for the interpretation, care, and administration of the house and its contents since 1928.

The museum's initial installations at Cedar Grove maintained a furniture plan prescribed by Miss Morris, which followed the colonial revival doctrines of her time. These installations were changed and improved at regular intervals in accordance with ongoing research and the prevailing theories of historic-house interpretation. Newly discovered documentary evidence and additional furnishings have now made it possible to present the house as a changing and evolving place, reflecting its use by successive generations of the family. Diaries, inventories, account books, and other papers have also provided new evidence suggesting changes the family made at different seasons or for specific celebrations, such as Christmas.

As with most historic houses, Cedar Grove evolved as a result of the daily needs and changing tastes of its owners. Elizabeth Coates Paschall, the daughter of Thomas and Beulah Coates, built the original structure on land adjoining her father's farm in Harrowgate, on the Frankford Road, about four miles north of Philadelphia. Born into a prominent Quaker family, Elizabeth had married a successful Quaker merchant, Joseph Paschall, in 1721, and the couple set up residence in a fashionable house on High Street in Philadelphia. Widowed in 1742, Elizabeth desired a summer house for her three children (Isaac, Beulah, and Joseph Jr.) near the farm on which she had been raised. While continuing her late husband's successful dry-goods business and main-mining the city house, Elizabeth's account books document her purchase and hauling of stone, brick, lime, lumber, and shingles beginning in August 1748, "for her house at Franckford."(2) She contracted the carpenter John Hitchcock and the stonemason Griffith Griffith to build the structure, which was two-and-one-half stories tall, with a gable roof and pent eaves over the first floor. The interior consisted of a parlor, a second-floor bedchamber, a garret, and a lean-to kitchen at the rear.

The house was unusually well built for this early period, laid in courses of carefully shaped, or dressed, local stone at a time when random rubble stone walls were most common. "One hundred thirty-two paynes of sash glass" were glazed into nine-over-nine window frames by Robert Cooper. A "marble hearth and chimney piece" were purchased from Authro Wilkinson for [pounds]4 6s. The interiors of the rooms were fully plastered by John White. The house, sign, and portrait painter Gustavus Hesselius (1682-1755) supervised the painting of the walls and woodwork, which was completed by August 1749.(3) In February of the following year, Elizabeth Coates Paschall paid Joseph Hitchcock "six shillings six pence for measuring the carpenters work of her household at Franckford," signaling the completion of the house.

Elizabeth continually made improvements to Cedar Grove, expanding the gardens and kitchen and improving the well during the 1750's. These refinements probably reflect her interest in medicinal herbs and domestic remedies as well as demands brought on by the regular entertainment of family and friends. Her neighbor, the noted Quaker botanist John Bartram (1699-1777), probably influenced her interest in herbs and garden improvements. Elizabeth regularly corresponded with Bartram during the compilation of her extensive recipe books, which record more than two hundred homeopathic remedies and cures.(4)

Elizabeth Coates Paschall died in 1768, and the house was inherited by her daughter, Beulah, and in 1795, by Beulah's niece (and adopted daughter) Sarah Paschall. In the same year Sarah married Isaac Wistar Morris, a wealthy Quaker from the Morris and Wistar families of Philadelphia. The couple set about expanding the house in 1799, doubling its size by the addition of a new parlor and kitchen on the first floor and two additional bedchambers, a nursery, and a "bathing room"(5) on the second floor. The gable roof was changed to a broad gambrel, which created a sweeping roofline spanning a new attic containing four garret rooms and a hall lit by an elegant lunette window set in the front wall. To fill the new rooms, the couple commissioned a number of additional stylish furnishings, many of which remain in the house.