Celebrate Pennsylvania's 332nd Birthday - Charter Day - March 10, 2013

The original Penn Charter, which established Pennsylvania, was issued by Charles II to William Penn in 1681, and is sometimes referred to as the state's "birth certificate." The State Museum of Pennsylvania, in Harrisburg, will display Penn's personal copy of the Charter for one week beginning on Charter Day, Sunday, March 10.

“The charter is a tangible link to Pennsylvania’s founding,” James M. Vaughan, PHMC executive director said. “The fragile historical document is exhibited only once a year and for a very short time in special protective cases with low light and controlled temperature and humidity levels.”

Also on display will be a Civil War era note written by Governor Andrew Curtin on June 16, 1863, ordering the defense of Pennsylvania’s border from “the Rebel Invader." The document underscores the anxious days just before the Battle of Gettysburg, as General Lee’s Confederate army crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.

The Charter and Curtin document will be exhibited from March 10 to March 17 at the State Museum in Harrisburg.

In addition to The State Museum’s programming, many historic sites and museums along PHMC’s Pennsylvania Trails of History® will offer free admission on March 10.

Participating sites include:

• Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum

• Brandywine Battlefield Park

• Bushy Run Battlefield

• Conrad Weiser Homestead

• Cornwall Iron Furnace

• Daniel Boone Homestead

• Drake Well Museum

• Eckley Miners’ Village

• Ephrata Cloister

• Erie Maritime Museum

• Graeme Park

• Fort Pitt Museum

• Joseph Priestley House

• Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum

• Old Economy Village

• Pennsbury Manor

• Pennsylvania Military Museum

• Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania

• Washington Crossing Historic Park

Graeme Park will be open from noon through about 3:30 (to give you time to see the house before we close at 4) for self-guided tours of the Keith House with docents in each room to answer questions and provide basic information on the history. For a complete tour, please visit us Fridays - Saturday, 10-3 or Sundays 12-3. For more information on Charter Day 2013, call 717-772-3257 or visit PHMC online at www.phmc.state.pa.us. For more information on Graeme Park, contact us directly at 215-343-0965 or www.graemepark.org.

Is Graeme Park Haunted?

Mention Graeme Park to a Horsham resident, and most will tell you it's haunted! The stories of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson's ghost have been circulating since her death in 1801 and continue to be experienced by our staff and volunteers today. The Horsham police dread the nighttime alarms they are sometimes called upon to answer at the Keith House. I can only vouche for what I myself have seen, heard, and smelled. Read for yourself and see what you think.

Betsy Stedman
Betsy Stedman was one of Elizabeth's closest friends. The two women lived together at Graeme Park after the Revolution. Elizabeth's husband, Henry Hugh Fergusson, had returned to England, branded a traitor for his Loyalist support during the war while Elizabeth struggled to regain title to her ancestral home, which was confiscated by the state for Henry's politics. The never-married Betsy had a small inheritance that the women lived off of until Elizabeth was able to regain title to her home and sell Graeme Park and move into rooms in a boarding house. Shortly after Elizabeth's death in 1801 Betsy was apparently back visiting Graeme Park and reported "passing Elizabeth on the stairs."

Margaret Marshall Strawbridge
Mrs. Strawbridge and her husband Welsh purchased Graeme Park in 1920. They lived in what is now known as the Penrose-Strawbridge house, elsewhere on the property and used the Keith House for entertaining. Mrs. Strawbridge had a real love of history and delighted in taking visitors down to "the old house" to show it off. The couple donated 42 acres of their property, including the Keith House, to the state of Pennsylvania in 1958. In 1989 she participated in an oral history project, allowing the staff at Graeme Park to interview her and record her memories on many subjects, including Graeme Park. The following excerpt is her accounting of the "ghost stories" associated with Graeme Park:

Interviewer: Do you believe in the ghost stories about Elizabeth and Hugh Fergusson?

MMS: It's hard to say just how much I believe. I nearly always had Irish help. And the Irish help always could see ... she used to see the Governor with a yellow satin waistcoat, and silver buckles on his shoes. She could tell me all the wonderful things she saw, I used to wish I could see, and almost made myself believe I did. I tried, with imagination, to see all the family. And it was very exciting.

Interviewer: But you never saw Elizabeth?
MMS: Not actually, but I really did think I heard the rustle of her skirts on the stairs. And, of course, I thought she was coming down the stairway. And it was easy to imagine a little breeze making that happen.

Interviewer: But you feel her presence?
MMS: I felt very strongly her presence.

Recent Experiences
One of the stories that was told to me shortly after I began working at Graeme Park had to do with a Christmas tour that had been held several years before. The volunteers had been in the house decorating the windowsills with artificial greenery and when lunch time came around, they locked the house, ate their lunch in the Visitor's Center and went back to the house to complete their task. They found the greenery on one of the windowsills in Elizabeth's room had been strewn around the floor. According to the history, Elizabeth sat in one of the windows of her bedroom on the terrible day in 1772 that she decided to tell her father of her marriage to Henry Hugh Fergusson and watched him drop over dead as he made his way through the gardens and back towards the house. Perhaps this greenery was in the way of her favorite spot to sit and observe her grounds.

Elizabeth's bedroom also contains a painting of her, which a few years ago was sent down to Washington DC to be cleaned and repaired. While it was gone one of our volunteers took a woman and her young daughter down to the house for a tour. While they were in Elizabeth's room the girl began tugging at her mother and whispered something to her. The mother said to the guide "she has her grandmother's gift, and she sees a dark haired woman sitting in the chair over there smiling." The girl was very young to be making up stories and the painting of Elizabeth, which shows her as a dark haired woman, was not in the room at the time.

Another more recent account took place a few years ago. The weekend before our annual Celtic Festival a couple from New Jersey came in for a tour. I took them around the house as usual and after the tour the man, who represented a Scottish Clan indicated his interest in setting up a table at the festival. He filled out the paperwork, handed over his check and they were on their way. The following week when he arrived to set up his space, he pulled me aside and asked "do people report strange things about the house?" When I inquired as to why he asked, he said when they got home his wife said she was convinced she'd heard children laughing outside on the grounds, but when she'd looked out the windows there was no one else around. Neither I nor her husband remembered hearing anything. The room we were in at the time, the master bedroom, is beneath the children's dormitory on the 3rd floor and because of the busyness and activities associated with setting up for the Festival, we skipped the video which has Mrs. Strawbridge speaking of her experiences with Elizabeth's ghost.

My Own Experiences
While all of the stories that have been passed down are fun to retell at Halloween, in general I will not mention them on a typical tour of Graeme Park. If my visitors should happen to ask, however, I will tell of my own personal experiences with Elizabeth's ghost.

The most common experience I have with her is in trying to set the alarms at the end of the day and they won't set. I push the buttons that tell me what the problem is, and it tells me that there is motion being detected in Elizabeth's bedroom. I trudge down to the house, knowing full well there is no one there, unlock the door with a large skeleton key, and call up the steps "Good night Elizabeth, the house is yours again." Back in the visitor's center I am then able to set the alarm. These instances frequently occur when we have stormy weather, Being somewhat rational, I'd like to attribute it to a fault in the alarm system triggered by the rain or wind, but perhaps it is on these dreary days that Elizabeth is more likely to be at home rather than out visiting her friends or enjoying the grounds at Graeme Park.

On another occasion I took a rather large group into the house, maybe 10 or 12 people. As we entered the office, I thought I heard footsteps beating it up the stairs in the adjacent stairhall. I did a quick head count to make sure no one from my group had slipped out of the room to explore on their own, but all were accounted for. So what ghostly presence had we caught unaware on the stairs?

More recently I was in the house with one other (female) volunteer setting up or cleaning up candles for an evening tour. As I descended the stairs between the 3rd and 2nd floors, I thought I heard a man's voice quietly say a few words. I could not make out what he said, and when questioned, the volunteer, who was down in Elizabeth's room at the other end of the house, had not spoken.

The closet in the third floor dormitory has a pin on the inside of the door that slips down into a hole in the floor, locking it from the inside. Before our evening candlelight programs I like to get the fire extinguishers out of the closets "just in case" but before one such program a few years ago, I was not able to open this one. I reached down and could feel under the door that the pin was engaged and there was no way to open the closet from the outside. No one of this earth was hiding inside. Several weeks later I tried the door again and it opened just fine, the pin being lifted and latched into place as it should have been. No one would admit to being in the house or accessing this closet for any reason.

On occasion I am unable to unlock the front door either. The locks are somewhat tricky if you're not familiar with them, but after many years of working here, I know just how far to insert the key and which way to turn it. Every once in awhile it is locked up tight and no amount of hammering will release it. Until suddenly it is fine.

In November, 2006, Sue Serio, a weather anchor on one of our local morning shows broadcast a segment she calls "Sue's Clues" from the parlor of the Keith House. She does the weather from a mystery location and viewers call and email in to try and guess where she is. During the 7:00 o'clock hour, their camera battery, which was at 80% capacity, suddenly went dead on them. I too have had problems taking photographs inside the house. The camera just malfunctions and won't take the picture, but when I go back outside everything is fine.

Perhaps my most dramatic experience with Elizabeth's ghosts occured a few years ago when we did an evening "Anniversary Tour" the day before her wedding anniverary with her husband Henry Hugh Fergusson. Elizabeth and Henry did not have the happiest of matches. She was 11 years older than he and married him in secret and against her father's wishes. She was said to have tripped on a tombstone as she left the churchyard after the ceremony, which was considered a bad omen. Henry served with the British during the Revolution, which broke out a few years after their marriage, seperating them during the war and after when he returned to England. There were allegations of an illegitimate child, which Elizabeth could not or would not get over. Our tour focused on this history, and likely stirred up some memories for Elizabeth. I tagged along with one of the groups to get photographs of the actors presenting the program. In Elizabeth's room, I smelled a sweet, flowery smell. I thought maybe someone had overdone it on their perfume, but did not smell it during the rest of the tour, some of the rooms being much smaller and the crowd bunched in tighter, than they were in her room. After the tour, which was on a rainy night, we had our usual problem with the alarm system detecting motion in her room. As I went down to the house to check on things with the volunteer who had played Elizabeth that night and been stationed in her room she mentioned having smelled this floral smell all night too. There are not many flowers on the grounds or Graeme Park and the windows are sealed up tight. So was a perfumed Elizabeth with us that night, enjoying the performance or bemoaning her rascal husband? Did scents from the once lush formal gardens to the north of the house and destroyed by encamped soldiers waiting to fight the Battle of Brandywine suddenly waft their way into her room as they may have back in the 18th century?  

So what do you think? Do you believe in ghosts? Tonight and tomorrow night (October 26-27, 2012) we'll be hosting our Haunted Moonlight Tours, where we explore Elizabeth's history and the stories and legends that have "haunted" us since her death in an entertaining, family-friendly tour presented by costumed reenactors. The tours run approximately every half hour between 7 and 9 pm and are $12/person, which includes light refreshments and a bonfire (weather permitting). We also host periodic Paranormal Investigations where groups investigate with various paranormal teams using high tech equipment - the next one is scheduled for November 3, 2012 and will include an investigation of the Penrose-Strawbridge House on the adjacent property and is $50/person which includes light snacks and a review of evidence collected on previous investigations. Contact us at 215-343-0965 for more information on either program.

Gone but Not Forgotten: The Joseph Kenderdine House

It stood on the corner of Keith Valley and Davis Grove Roads for some 277 years, originally providing shelter for Joseph Kenderdine and his family who built and operated the mill on the opposite corner. The success of the mill meant the opening of Keith Valley and Davis Grove Roads so as to provide the local farmers with easier access to the mill, and the increasing circumstances of the family meant the enlarging of the home by a later generation, when the piece to the left was added on, more than doubling the space. The house is part of the Kenderdine Mill Complex which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1992. Part of the description of the house in the nomination form reads as follows:

Its easternmost portion shows the steep roof pitch of pre-Georgian design. Its massive corner fireplace and winder stair are typical of early eighteenth century plans as well. Although the stair has been replaced on the first floor, it survives on the second floor into the attic. In the basement, the timbers of that early portion of the house are hewn and pit sawn, corroborating the antiquity of the forms and the plan. The house was enlarged with a two room deep "two thirds Georgian" Federal wing in the early nineteenth century, probably at the time that the mill was sold to Shay. Federal mantels, door and window surrounds, and chair rails establish the period of the addition while the old, single room house became the hall and kitchen...Both the mill and the early house show the character of the early eighteenth century, only a decade after the completion of nearby Graeme Park. The later Federal addition....[is] graced by mantels and trim which show the influence of Benjamin Latrobe's work in Philadelphia and mark the evolution of local building from craft to design.

When the mill was sold in 1810 to John Shay, the house was parcelled off to remain in the Kenderdine family while the Shays built an impressive stone farmhouse on the opposite corner and continued the operation of the milling business. It was most likely around this time that the enlargement of the original house took place. The land around the Kenderdine House continued to evolve through the 20th century, the dirt roads that provided access to the mill were eventually paved, the township built a large multi-use park across the street, a few more modern houses became its neighbors and a golf course became its back yard. The old sycamore by its front door, probably as old as the house, continued to grow, the house began to decline.

Not properly mothballed, water and animals were allowed to infiltrate, the once handsome Federal trim around the doors began to peel and separate from the walls, the window glass got broken, the shutters fell off one by one and vines crept up the masonry walls, digging their roots into the soft limestone stucco and the mortar that glued the stones together.

On Monday, April 16, 2012 Commonweath Country Club, the owners of the c. 1735 Joseph Kenderdine House, tore it down. The backhoes were still moving the earth around on Friday morning when the below photo was snapped, but give it a little more time, some grass seed, and the Commonwealth landscaping crew, and you'll never know it was there, save for the old sycamore keeping watch over his longtime companion's buried stone foundation.

The remainder of the Kenderdine Mill Complex -- the 1734-35 mill with mid-19th century addition, the early 19th c. Shay House, and the mid-19th c. carriage barn -- are all beautifully preserved and adapted for modern living and under different ownership. Hopefully they will continue on for a long time as an enduring testament to the Kenderdines and the Shays and the early industrial, architectural, and developmental history of Horsham Township. The National Register nomination lists the significance of the complex as:

An example of a remarkably well preserved, industrial complex surviving on its original site and dating from the first years of the settlement of Pennsylvania. Its evolution over more than a century denoted the continuing agricultural heritage of south-eastern Pennsylvania. Its construction stimulated the opening of many of the roads of the region including the Horsham Road, Keith Valley Road, and Davis Grove Road which made it possible for local farmers to reach the mill....the complex of buildings display the characteristics of the evolving architectural character of the region from the primitive Colonial buildings of the early eighteenth century towards the sophisticated Federal designs of the early nineteenth century.

A now an early piece of this history is gone.

For more information on the Kenderdine Mill Complex, see this article, information for which was taken from the National Register nomination, and the recent real estate listing, which shows that careful stewardship and sensitive adaptation can make these old buildings as liveable and useful today as they were to their earlier inhabitants.