All Episodes

ABC:LHS #086-3 William Potter & Frederick Vanuxem... 
... were brothers-in-law and best friends. Potter served as President of Thomas Jefferson University for many years despite the lack of a college degree. Vanuxem left a legacy for Princeton which is still celebrated. 

ABC:LHS #086-2   Charles & William Kindred...
...became rich men in railroad land speculation. There is a town named for them in North Dakota. They broke quite a few rules along the way. 

ABC:LHS #086-1   Francis Thomas Lilly Sully Darley...
...was the grandson of the famed portrait painter and married the daughter of locomotive manufacturer Matthias Baldwin. He wrote operas, played the organ, conducted choirs, but his art collection was staggering. 

ABC:LHS #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. 
 

ABC:LHS #085-5   Samuel Perkins...
...was the driving force behind getting the job done at City Hall. He established a close relationship with architect John McArthur, Jr., and sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, who honored him with a series of playful marble cats tucked away in the south entrance vestibule. 

ABC-LHS #085-4   John Christian Bullitt...
...was a native Kentuckian who was pro-slavery, but who made his career as a Philadelphia lawyer. His constitutional knowledge and skills led to him rewriting the City's Charter, which immediately became known as The Bullitt Bill. He also helped clear Fitz John Porter of his court martial charges 15 years after the fact. His statue has stood at the northwest corner of City Hall for more than a century. 

ABC:LHS #085-3   John McArthur, Jr....
...was a Scottish immigrant who specialized in huge buildings that were meant to last a long time. When his massive Philadelphia City Hall was finished, it was the largest building in the Western Hemisphere. Sculptor Alexander Milne Calder honored him with a representation as SCIENCE in the eastern portico. He is naked ... and buff. 

ABC:LHS #085-2  Matthias Baldwin...
...was always good with his hands. He started as a jeweler and progressed to bookbinding before he built one of the first steam engines in the nation. When the Age of Steam emerged, Baldwin became the foremost manufacturer of reliable locomotives that were also works of art. 

ABC-LHS #085-1   Statues Outside City Hall...
... are eight. I talked about the 250 statues inside and attached to Philadelphia's City Hall in ABC:LHS #018-1. Outside at ground level are eight named statues, including two Civil War generals, a martyred US president, a civil rights hero, a merchant king, and two others. Industrialist / capitalist / philanthropist Matthias Baldwin and John Christian Bullitt, the lawyer who rewrote the city's charter are at Laurel Hill East. It's their stories and two others you'll here about in this episode.

ABC:LHS #085-0   Philadelphia's City Hall...
...doubles as an art gallery and sculpture garden. More than 250 of Alexander Milne Calder's statues grace the massive walls of the building. But at ground level on the plaza outside the building there are seven more statues, two of them equestrian. 
Matthias William Baldwin was a precision jeweler turned locomotive manufacturer who gave away most of his wealth. His factory manufactured 75,000 railroad engines before it closed down.
John McArthur, Jr., was a Scottish architect who specialized in massive buildings. City Hall in its time was the largest building in the Western Hemisphere. 
William Bullitt was a transplanted southern lawyer who believed in both slavery and secession, yet he was chosen to rewrite the city's constitution in the 1870s. 
Samuel Perkins was the Director of the Public Buildings who ruled over the proceedings with an iron fist and was rewarded with a private joke in the south entry portico. 

BBB:LHWS #054   Sophie Hutchinson Drinker...
...came from one Philadelphia blueblood family and married into another. I told of the singing parties she and her husband Harry led in their Merion home for 30 years in ABC:LHS 041-1. When Sophie started a woman's choir, she was frustrated when she looked for music by, for, and about women. She made it her life's work to discover how woman had been shut out from their early roles in religion, medicine, and music. Her 1948 book Music & Women is a feminist classic. The Sophie Drinker Institute of Bremen Germany carries on women's music studies in her name and tradition. 

ABC-LHS #084-4   Emmy Lou "Clare" Linford Wofford...
...was present at the creation of the United States Peace Corps, along with her husband Harris Wofford, one of John Kennedy's "Best and Brightest." While Harris served as college president and United States Senator, Clare served in the background at three Philadelphia Universities. 

ABC:LHS #084-3 Florence Cowanova...
...was born Cowan, but on the suggestion of dancer Anna Pavlova, she adopted the surname Cowanova. Florence was immersed in dance: father specialized in kinesiology, while her mother handled publicity. She ran a popular studio that staged large recitals at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, featuring hundreds of students. Thousands of Philadelphia girls fondly remember their sessions with Mme. Cowanova, who made them all feel like princesses. 
 

ABC:LHS #084-2   Matilda "Tillie May" Forney...
...gained newspaper experience as her publisher father’s secretary and became a writer known for her “Fashionable Luncheon and Tea Toilets” column, which focused on high society fashion and etiquette. She catered to an affluent audience and discussed topics like French fabrics and social customs.

ABC:LHS #084-1   Emily Elizabeth "E.E." Holman...
...started as a desk clerk in an architect's office but quickly showed her talent in design. She blossomed into a sought-after architect who practiced independently and designed homes, theaters, and institutional buildings over a career of about twenty years.