![]() ![]() It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and serves as the Cheltenham High School boys and girls cross-country teams’ home course. The Township hosts a “Concerts in the Park Free Music Series” there each summer. Today the location is free to the public and open from dawn to dusk. It was donated to the Township by his daughter, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who also founded Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Prominent Philadelphia banker Abraham Barker purchased his estate in that year and named it “Lyndon.” Following his dramatic bank failure in 1890, the estate was purchased by an enterprising publisher, Cyrus Curtis, who constructed his own million-dollar manse on the property. Davis, who sold estates for country homes to the wealthy businessmen of Philadelphia. The name “Chelten Hills” was affixed to the area in 1854 by an abolitionist entrepreneur, Edward M. Wieckowski, Vice-President of the Old York Road Historical Society and Vice-Chair of the Cheltenham Township Historical Commission:įor 170 years after the William Penn land grant to William Frampton, the rolling fields of today’s Curtis Arboretum were legacy Quaker farmlands. Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis circa 1918Īccording to Thomas J. Demolished, except for the 1903 ballroom addition, now Curtis Hall. In the early 1900s, Curtis, who published The Saturday Evening Post and a thriving sheet music business, held opulent parties at the estate located on Church Road in Wyncote. Images of his original designs are below: Mary Louse Curtis Bok, then the proprietor, decided to give the estate to Cheltenham Township in 1937 but first hired Olmsted Sons to create an arboretum on the grounds of the estate.Īccording to Friends of Curtis Arboretum, Olmsted “believed that Parks contribute to mental and physical health, and by doing so, help to develop the web of connections that make community possible.” For his project’s plan courtesy of the Olmsted Archives, you can click here. ![]() Meehan is famous for saving Bartram’s Gardens and creating Hunting Park in the northern reaches of the city among other projects. ![]() When newspaper baron Cyrus Curtis purchased the Lyndon estate from Abraham Barker in 1893, he hired Philadelphia botanist and horticulturalist Thomas Meehan of Germantown to landscape his property. ![]()
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