The Woodward Legacy, Part 2: George and Gertrude and the making of Chestnut Hill

Posted 6/2/16

These Springfield Avenue houses were among the first homes George Woodward built in Chestnut Hill. Although designed with working people in mind, they were immediately popular with the professional …

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The Woodward Legacy, Part 2: George and Gertrude and the making of Chestnut Hill

Posted
These Springfield Avenue houses were among the first homes George Woodward built in Chestnut Hill. Although designed with working people in mind, they were immediately popular with the professional class. They also set the tone for Woodwards’ preference for Wissahickon schist, a hallmark of many homes the family would build in the coming decades. (Photo by Pete Mazzaccaro) These Springfield Avenue houses were among the first homes George Woodward built in Chestnut Hill. Although designed with working people in mind, they were immediately popular with the professional class. They also set the tone for Woodwards’ preference for Wissahickon schist, a hallmark of many homes the family would build in the coming decades. (Photo by Pete Mazzaccaro)[/caption]

by Pete Mazzaccaro

If Henry Houston was the man whose vision of a model suburb set the foundation of Chestnut Hill, it was his daughter Gertrude and son-in-law George Woodward who refined that vision, doubled its size and made sure it remained nearly the same for 100 years.

Historian David Contosta, who wrote a comprehensive biography of the Houston-Wodward family in his book, “A Philadelphia Family: The Houston and Woodwards of Chestnut Hill,” said without the Woodwards, Chestnut Hill would be very different.

“Chestnut Hill is what it is today because of the Woodwards,” he said.

And what it is, according to Contosta, is a genuine railroad suburb in which the scale of the community is planned around walking and public green spaces, not around the automobile, which would dictate the plans for suburbs built after World War II.

“Chestnut Hill, the west side really, is a model of what can be done to plan a sustainable community,” Contosta said. “It’s one in which the built world blends with the natural.”

Dr. George Woodward was born in Wilkes Barre, Pa., in 1863 during the height of the Civil War. His family traced its roots to Connecticut and as far back as the Revolution.

Woodward graduated from Yale and then went on to medical school at Penn. On a vacation near Wilkes Barre, he met a young Gertrude Houston. They were soon engaged and moved to Philadelphia, a condition for the marriage set by his father-in-law, Henry Houston, the Pennsylvania railroad magnate turned real estate developer. In 1894, the Woodwards would move into house across the street from the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in Wissahickon Heights that had been carved out of the woods of west Chestnut Hill.

Woodard tried several times to set up a general practice, but it never worked out. Before long, however, he would find himself in charge of Houston’s sizeable real estate concerns, some 100+ homes that Houston had built and rented to families in the new suburb.

Contosta said Woodward had become very much interested in the progressive Republican politics in the mold of U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt (whose presidency lasted from 1901 to 1909). It was that progressivism that motivated Woodward to build a suburb that recalled an earlier time in its architecture and connection to nature in the form of ample open space and woodlands, but one that also employed the most progressive systems of the time in planning social welfare and technology.

“Progressives of that time were always looking forward and backwards,” Contosta said. “Woodward was aware of the harms caused by early industrialization, but he believed that science could solve the problems industrialization had caused.”

By the time he and Gertrude would take over the operation of Wissahickon Heights, Woodward was deeply involved in urban housing charity in the form of the Octavia Hill Association, an organization founded in 1896 dedicated to establishing affordable housing for the city’s poor. That organization still operates apartment buildings in the city today.

In Chestnut Hill, Woodward did not set out to build homes for the poor, but he would continue Houston’s practice of building homes and maintaining their ownership, leasing them to tenants. Also, like his father-in-law, large profits were not a motivating factor for his involvement in real estate. He maintained rents for the life of the lease and expected no more than a minimum return on his investment. In fact, both men believed in taking no more than a 6 percent return, an idea that was popular with progressives at the time.

“He and Houston weren’t in it for the money,” Contosta said. “Woodward believed in people staying for three generations. They’d begin in one of the twins on Benezet Street and later graduate to a larger home to accommodate a family.”

In about 1905, 10 years after the death of Henry Houston, Woodward began to purchase land east of Germantown Avenue on Springfield Ave. There he built a set of twin homes. These were followed by similar ones on Benezet Street and Winston Road.

With these homes, Woodward would begin the Chestnut Hill style of architecture that would become foundation for the look and feel of the neighborhood. Unlike the more traditional homes built by his father-in-law, Woodward was a fan of the emerging craftsman style as well as romantic and revival ideas in English and French architecture.

With a set of three architects – Robert Rhodes McGoodwin, Edmund Gilchrist and Louis Duhring – Woodward would add 180 homes to the family real estate portfolio in a Wissahickon Heights neighborhood that he and Gertrude had rebranded as St. Martins. It was Gertrude whose affinity for Native American history led to the renaming of the north to south streets in the neighborhood after Native American tribes – Shawnee, Seminole, Navajo and Huron.

Gertrude and George Woodward. Gertrude and George Woodward.

Woodward had grown fond of romantic ideas about the English garden court and the French Village. These ideas would be realized in his English Court building at the corner of Willow Grove Avenue and Lincoln Drive, Winston Court and in Mt. Airy’s French Village homes between Cresheim Valley Drive and McCallum Street just north of Allens Lane.

It was in these years, in the 1910s and 1920s when West Chestnut Hill took the shape it still has today. Currently, the George Woodward Company still is run by members of the Woodward family and still owns, maintains and rents well over 100 homes in Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy.

As important as the Woodwards were to the physical and architectural environment of Chestnut Hill, they continued to build on Henry Houston’s cultural and recreational institutions. Woodward was a founding member of the Friends of the Wissahickon and the family donated the Water Tower Recreation Center to the city. The Woodwards were also patrons of the arts, having rented a home to the prominent muralist Violet Oakley and the stained-glass artist William Willet, whose studio Willet Hauser would remain in Chestnut Hill for nearly 100 years. (That building is now the Fresenius Dialysis Center at 10 E. Moreland Ave.)

But most important is the establishment of Chestnut Hill as a model suburb that retains a relationship with the natural area from which it came.

“If you look at an aerial view of Chestnut Hill, it’s nearly impossible to tell where the Wissahickon park ends and where Chestnut Hill begins,” Contosta said. “That tree cover is because the Woodwards were so good at blending the built with the natural. If the Woodwards had not retained West Chestnut Hill and built it the way they had, there’s no telling what it would look like today.”

The Woodwards will be honored in a five-day celebration beginning Wednesday, June 8, through Sunday, June 12. It will include numerous events marking the family’s contributions to Chestnut Hill, the City of Philadelphia and even Charleston, S.C., where a branch of the Woodward family lived.

As the event committee chair, Will Detweiler, said, the event will mark the Woodward and Houston family legacy and how important that legacy was to shaping Chestnut Hill.

“It’s all in part with continuing the tradition of the Woodwards and taking responsibility for preserving Chestnut Hill and making sure the neighborhood we love is maintained for future generations,” Detweiler said.

To register or purchase tickets, please visit www.woodwardcommunitycentre.org. Guests can pick up a printed invitation at the Chestnut Hill Welcome Center (CHBA), 16 East Highland Avenue. For more information, call 215-248-8810.

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