No name is more prominent in the history of Chestnut Hill than Henry Howard Houston (1820-1895), a wealthy executive for the Pennsylvania Railroad who lived with his large family in a massive home at Wayne Avenue and Tulpehocken Street in Germantown. Starting in the late 1870s, the visionary Houston purchased huge quantities of undeveloped land north of Allens Lane and west of Germantown Avenue. He eventually would push past these boundaries, and his son-in-law, George Woodward, would build countless new houses even beyond that.
“He owned 3,000 acres all the way to the corner of Ridge and Butler Pikes,” wrote Dr. David Contosta, a longtime history professor at Chestnut Hill College and author of “A Philadelphia Family: The Houstons and Woodwards of Chestnut Hill.”
Dr. Eleanor Morris, a prominent architecture professor and city planner in her own right and direct descendant of Henry Howard Houston, died of age-related issues on Aug. 16 at age 89.
Morris’ son, Malcolm, told the Local last week, “My mother’s mother was the daughter of Samuel Frederick Houston and granddaughter of Henry Howard Houston, who developed Chestnut Hill. My mother kept a house inside Sugarloaf at 31 W. Bells Mill Rd. which we just sold, although her principal base was Scotland. My father [James Morris] came on scholarship to Penn from Edinburgh, Scotland, and met my mother in Chestnut Hill.
“They left Philadelphia as my father felt there were more opportunities to start his own architectural practice in Scotland, but my mother was American and sounded like most of the old Chestnut Hill types. She was a great pianist, loved to play Chopin and was very involved in the arts broadly.”
Born Eleanor Kenner Smith, Morris spent her childhood in Washington, D.C. Her father, Lawrence M.C. Smith, was an assistant attorney general during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a chairman of the Philadelphia Board of Trade. Her mother, Eleanor Houston Smith, was a conservationist and founder of the Schuylkill Valley Nature Center (now the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education) in upper Roxborough.
With her husband, Morris was a founder of Wolfe’s Neck Woods State Park and the Wolfe’s Neck Farm Foundation (now the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment) in Freeport, Maine. She had a lifelong interest in conservation and ecology and a commitment to farming methods that encouraged sustainable agriculture without chemical pesticides.
Morris attended the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., and later, when her family moved to Philadelphia, Germantown Friends School. Very precocious, she was accepted at what was then Radcliffe College (the female counterpart to Harvard University, now part of Harvard) at age 16. She graduated in 1956 with honors and a degree in Architectural Sciences. She was taught by Walter Gropius, of the architectural department at Harvard and one of the nation’s foremost architects and a pioneer of modernist architecture.
Houston Morris, Eleanor’s other son, told us, “After graduating from Radcliffe, she earned a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where she met her husband-to-be, James S. Morris. He was studying at Penn on a Fulbright Scholarship from the Edinburgh College of Art. After her master’s degree, she studied at the University of London and lived with Lucy Norton, OBE [Order of the British Empire, a distinguished title], who introduced her to a wide variety of academic and literary people.”
Eleanor returned to Philadelphia for her marriage to James S. Morris in 1959. The couple moved back to Edinburgh, where James Morris had a growing architectural practice, initially designing modern houses. (James died on Aug. 16, 2006, the same day that Eleanor died on 19 years later.)
After she was introduced to Robert Matthew, a leading proponent of modernism and the founder of the then-new Department of Architecture at Edinburgh University, Eleanor Morris was offered a position in the department and received tenure at a very young age. She earned her doctorate, writing about the benefits of “pocket parks” in dense inner-city areas and was a senior lecturer from 1997 to 2017, teaching a course on town planning.
Morris served on the executive committee of the National Trust for Scotland from 1995 to 2001, and she published “British Town Planning and Urban Design: Principles and Policies” in 1997, which examined the development of that planning from historical times to the present.
In addition to all of her professional accomplishments, Malcolm Morris said his mother was “very loyal, and she prized aesthetics, independence and education. She believed that ideas are more important than people.”
The funeral for Eleanor Morris was Oct. 14 at Old St. David’s Episcopal Church in Radnor. There will be a memorial service in Edinburgh in the new year.
In addition to her sons, she is survived by a daughter, Alexandra. The family would like any donations in her memory to go to the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, founded by her mother and cousin, and/or Collen Brook Farm in Upper Darby.
Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.
