inside the woodlands estate blockley township

Religiously inspired members of the newly formed Whig Party and other reformers who shared their ideals created new institutions intended to provide custodial care for indigents and other castoffs from the nation’s new and transformative industrial economy. The decades at the midpoint of the National Period saw religious and moral impulses associated with the Second Great Awakening shaping social reform. “Old Blockley” is properly viewed, in both its organization and administration, as one of several new and dramatic types of social innovations that appeared in the North in the 1830s and 1840s (precursors of twenty-first-century institutions). (From the late-nineteenth to the twenty-first century, the University of Pennsylvania’s eastward campus expansion beyond Franklin Field toward the river would have to go under or over intractable railway lines.) Here and there near the almshouse farm were a few buildings for private business or public purposes, and a few wharves were located on both sides of the river.” The tracks and trestle of the Philadelphia and West Chester Railroad crossed the meadows of the bottomland on Blockley Almshouse property the City had transferred to the railroad. The old Market Street bridge on the site of the more ancient ferry was the chief means of getting across the Schuylkill to the almshouse and hospital, although there was some ferriage from the east side to a wharf or landing on the almshouse grounds. In 1854, “the vicinity of the almshouse was distinctly rural. The almshouse included indigent housing, workshops, and hospital facilities with an “insane department.” By 1854, the year of Philadelphia City-County consolidation, a quadrangle of four sprawling brick-and-stone buildings surrounded by “a high board fence” stood on hilly terrain above the Schuylkill River, a short distance from the Woodlands Cemetery on the old Hamilton property. In 1834, the City relocated its almshouse (poorhouse) from 11th and Spruce streets in the central city to a 187-acre tract of farmland purchased in 1829 from the William Hamilton Estate in Blockley Township in West Philadelphia, hence the name Blockley Almshouse.

Inside the woodlands estate blockley township