A Few Loose Ends: Cleaning Out Some Old Files

All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories #086 for May 1, 2026

I was tied up with preparing some new tours and could not finish the podcast on the Bible Riots of 1844. I scrounged around and found a few scripts I had written and never used. And then I remembered a segment that Thomas Keels recorded for me for an abandoned project. 

Francis Lilly Sully Darley was the grandson of a great portrait painter who married the daughter of Matthias Baldwin and became the most sought-after organist and choir director in the city.

The Kindred Brothers went west to Minnesota and North Dakota and became fabulously wealthy with their shady railroad real estate deals. One served as mayor of Fargo. 

William Potter and Louis Clark Vanuxem were best friends and brothers in law. Through years of dedication, Potter's name is inextricably tied with Thomas Jefferson University, while Louis's name is preserved at Princeton.

Fellow guide and amateur historian Thomas Keels tells the story of how the Great Profile Shakespearean actor John Barrymore ended up without a marker in a nearly abandoned cemetery decades after his demise.