Ardmore Catchup Plus (10/31/2020)

Saturday, October 31, 2020 (continued)

A couple more spots to see in Ardmore, PA:

St Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church Cemetery
(1765) contains many graves of American
Revolutionary War veterans (as well as
veterans from later wars)

The cemetery also has a German schoolhouse (1789)

Interior of the schoolhouse; after 1834, the basement
was used to store bodies in the winter when the ground
was too frozen to dig graves

Fence around Suntop Homes (1939, by Frank Lloyd Wright),
a four-dwelling unit that was part of the "Ardmore Experiment"
to provide low-cost standardized housing

Suntop Homes featured wood, glass, and brick

Next: Upper Darby, PA:

Hoodland (1823) was the home of Abraham L Pennock, 
an abolitionist who founded an anti-slavery newspaper,
"The Non-Slaveholder," advising people not to buy slave-made
products lest they become "slave-owners" themselves

The home was part of the Underground Railroad, and is now part of the Upper Darby Sellers Memorial Free Library. Abraham Pennock was also an advocate of women's suffrage and the temperance movement.

Next: Drexel Hill, PA:

Lower Swedish Cabin  (c 1640-1650) may be one of the
oldest log cabins in the United States, part of the New Sweden
Colony (1638-1655) established during the Thirty Years' War

Final stop: Clifton Heights, PA;

A historical marker at the last site of James Industries,
maker of the Slinky toy that was invented in 1943 by mechanical
engineer Richard James when he was trying to develop a
spring to keep sensitive shipboard equipment from jostling
on the high seas - a reject fell and shimmied around the floor

The coil spring was named Slinky by James's wife, Betty, and soon became a popular toy. In 1960, Richard James announced that he was going to Bolivia to join the evangelical Wycliffe Bible Translators. Having left the company near bankruptcy due to donations to that religious group, it was up to Betty to carry on. She mortgaged her home to push the Slinky at the New York Toy Fair in 1963, and embraced national advertising with a catchy jingle, all resulting in a multimillion dollar enterprise with world-wide distribution. Today all Slinkys are made in Hollidaysburg, PA and it is the Pennsylvania State Toy.

Happy Hallowe'en!