Walter Lippincott’s Alscot

Publisher’s Son

Mr. and Mrs. Lippincott with 6-year-old Bertha, Germany, 1886.

Early in 1892, when his only child was 11, Walter Lippincott (son of noted Philadelphia publisher J.B. Lippincott) began the purchase of his 20-acre summer estate on Fishers Road in Bryn Mawr, between the Wheeler and Fisher estates.

Part of the Lippincott property near the corner of Pennswood and Fishers roads included the Lovell farmhouse which was later enlarged and named Greenway. A concrete walkway wandered through specimen trees between Greenway and the service buildings on the Avon Road end of the property.

During the war, Greenway was the site of frequent large parties for wounded servicemen held by Lippincott’s daughter, Mrs. Stricker Coles. Mrs. Coles won the Gimbel Award for helping the wounded and founding the United Service Club in Philadelphia during World War I. About two years before our involvement in World War II, the 50-room mansion was demolished.

Alscot

Lippincott named the mansion house, Alscot, after Alverdiscott (pronounced Als-cot) in County Devon, England, where the Lippincott clan had been living since the 16th century.

Walter Lippincott’s vast Main Line estate also included a guest house he named The Annex. East of the main house was a cluster of 13 buildings: dog kennels, garage, stable, carriage house, tool house, duck house, two hen houses, a greenhouse, a laundry/workshop, a power house (used for heating the main house, still standing), Colony Cottage (still standing), and Hillside Cottage (where foreman Hatton lived). Two other buildings across Avon Road remain: Sunnyside Cottage and Haven Cottage.

Daughter’s Marriage

In 1908, Walter and Elizabeth (Bessie) Trotter Horstmann Lippincott’s only child, Bertha, married Dr. Stricker Coles. Their wedding reception was held at Alscot. The couple lived next to her parents on Walnut Street in Philadelphia (a common wall joined the two residences) but at some point the family gave up city living and made Alscot their main home. Summers were spent at Jamestown, Rhode Island (favored by the wealthy Philadelphia Quakers over Newport) and on their yacht.

The Annex

Nestled at Alscot’s back door, this was the guest house used for parties. In 1932, Dr. and Mrs. Coles’ son Walter and his bride, Frances Sadtler, spent their honeymoon night at the Annex and lived there for three years. They subsequently moved with their toddler into Greenway for a couple of years until a new stone house, Colesbrook, was built for them on Avon Road.

Greenway, c. 1920, before stucco was added to the upper walls.

The barn was one of the 13 outbuildings on the Alscot estate.

Mrs. Walter Lippincott with daughter, Bertha, and Arthur Jarvis, family coachman since 1880, at Alscot’s barn in the summer of 1897.

Mrs. Lippincott at the front of Alscot with coachman Jarvis.

—Written by Elizabeth Coles Umstattd

Memories

Back eighty years ago, the people in Gladwyne were mostly farm workers. It’s interesting to me how their houses were built on lots 60 feet across the front and 200 to 300 feet back. They’re all that way up the street.

Everybody had to be self-sufficient in those days, so everybody needed a plot of ground in the back where. well, first of all, they had a toilet. Nobody had a bathroom in his house or if he did, it was not as we think of bathrooms today. So everybody had one of those “privies” surrounded by lilac bushes, or a yellow bush that we called a “privy bush.”

Everybody had chickens, and they all had a garden. They all had a grapevine because mother made grape jelly, you know; there was nowhere else to get it. Some families had an apple tree or two, maybe a pear tree or some other kind of fruit tree.

The women who were always at home were never idle, because they always had fruit to be canned and stored away or jellies to be made. Another thing they had was rhubarb; they made pie from it. Everybody had a little bed of rhubarb because rhubarb came up every year. It was no trouble at all.

Fathers who worked around the countryside in the farms came home in late afternoon and when they’d had their dinner they worked in their own gardens. They didn’t have anything to listen to or watch, or anything. And so this became a real nice type of place where everybody was friendly with everybody else.

—Margaret Doran