Designing with nature: Sustainable development by the Houston and Woodward families

Posted 2/10/16

Benezet Street twins built by George and Gertrude Woodward. (Photo by Carol Franklin) by David R. Contosta for the Chestnut Hill Historical Society For more than 130 years, the Houston and Woodward …

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Designing with nature: Sustainable development by the Houston and Woodward families

Posted
Benezet Street twins built by George and Gertrude Woodward. (Photo by Carol Franklin) Benezet Street twins built by George and Gertrude Woodward. (Photo by Carol Franklin)

by David R. Contosta for the Chestnut Hill Historical Society

For more than 130 years, the Houston and Woodward families have provided Northwest Philadelphia with hundreds of acres of sustainable open space and real estate development. Although there are several possible meanings for sustainability, it might be defined as an imaginative interweaving of the natural and built environments in ways that allow both to coexist and endure.

The story begins with the family patriarch, Henry Howard Houston, a multifaceted entrepreneur who left a substantial fortune at the time of his death in 1895. Besides his investments in various industrial enterprises, Houston purchased some 3,000 acres of nearly contiguous property in Mount Airy, Chestnut Hill, Upper Roxborough, and adjoining Montgomery County.

In 1884, Houston launched a development on Chestnut Hill’s West Side that he called Wissahickon Heights. In addition to building about 100 houses, most of which he rented, Houston set aside large tracts of land for the Philadelphia Cricket Club and the Wissahickon Inn, which is now part of the campus of Springside Chestnut Hill Academy. Following Houston’s death, his son Samuel F. Houston became the principal trustee of his father’s estate, with its vast land holdings.

Samuel Houston’s sister Gertrude and her husband George Woodward built approximately 180 housing units in Chestnut Hill and West Mount Airy, beginning about 1904 and continuing into the early 1930s. In order to provide as much open space as possible, the Woodwards clustered their units as twin, triple, and quadruple houses, in addition to courts and crescents. Most of these units were constructed of the local stone, known as Wissahickon schist, and the property around them was planted with native trees.

Two of Samuel Houston’s children, Eleanor Houston Smith and Margaret Meigs, donated some 500 acres in the mid-1960s to form what became the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Roxborough. A decade later Eleanor and her children conveyed 100 acres of the old Andorra Nursery to Wissahickon Park, which included the well-known “Tree House.”

Most recently, at the end of 2015, the Woodwards deeded nearly 40 acres of an historic golf course to the Philadelphia Cricket Club, with a preservation easement that would preclude development of this land in perpetuity. The club had created the course back in 1895 on land belonging to the Houston Estate.

Altogether, five generations of the Houston and Woodward families have preserved approximately 1,000 acres of local open space, much of it woven into the natural landscape.

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