All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories

BBB:LHWS #051-3   Frank Dumont... ...was a seminal figure in minstrel culture. He began as a performer in a troupe that set the enduring standard format for minstrel shows. Dumont introduced popular songs such as “Silver Threads Among the Gold” and “When You and I Were Young, Maggie."

BBB:LHWS #051-2   E.F. Dixey & John Carncross... ...were the bedrock of Philadelphia minstrelsy for more than 20 years. Many people did not feel a trip to the Quaker City was complete if they didn't make a stop at the 11th Street Burnt Cork Opera House. I also discuss pigmentocracy, historical nonracial uses of blackface, scientific racism, Black Philadelphia society in the mid-19th century, a...

BBB:LHWS #051-1   Human performance... ...has ancient roots in ritual, storytelling, music, and dance, evolving from prehistoric communal activities to formalized theater. Mumming originated in pre-Christian seasonal rites that involved masked performances which symbolized death and rebirth. In the 19th century, minstrel shows featured white performers in blackface who caricatured African American...

BBB:LHWS #051-0   Mummery & Minstrelsy in the City of Brotherly Love Philadelphia has been the home of Mummers for centuries and you can still see their antics every New Year's Day. For the latter part of the 19th century, Philadelphia was also the place to see a minstrel show. The Carncross & Dixey company made both of its owners rich men and provided entertainment for thousands of Philad...

ABC:LHS #041-4   Benjamin Wood Richards... ...was mayor during a time with challenges like public health crises, infrastructure needs, and social tensions in Philadelphia. Richards helped found the Girard Trust Company in 1835 and served as its president. He was inspired by Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery on a European trip, and the helped found Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery.

ABC:LHS #081-3   Nathan Dunn... ...sailed as a merchant to China around 1818 and gained respect by avoiding the opium trade, rather engaging in tea, silks, porcelain, and other goods. He returned with a massive artifact collection and opened his wildly successful Chinese Museum in Philadelphia. Late in life, he was accused of illegal homosexual activity and put on trial for the crime of sodomy.

ABC:LHS #081-2   John Jay Smith served diverse roles as librarian, editor, cemetery founder, and member of the Society of Friends. He introduced paper made from straw, and invented something that sounds suspiciously like the Book of the Month club a century before the real thing. 

ABC:LHS #081-1 In the Beginning... Inspired by the allegory of Old Mortality, Laurel Hill was founded in 1836 by John Jay Smith, Benjamin Richards, Nathan Dunn, and Frederick Brown as response to overcrowded urban graveyards and changing attitudes toward death and memorialization.

ABC:LHS #081-0   The First 20 Years of Laurel Hill Cemetery Laurel Hill Cemetery was founded opened in 1836 to give the people of Philadelphia a final resting place worthy of the "Athens of America."  John Jay Smith was a polymath librarian / horticulturalist who had a rather unpleasant experience in seeking the grave of a recently deceased daughter and vowed to change the way people commemorated...

BBB:LHWS #052-1   Lon Jourdet... ...was an All-American footballer who also excelled at basketball. He spent 23 years as coach at Penn and captured more than 200 victories, but he left in 1943 with a bitter taste in his mouth for the University, which has come close to forgetting him. He ended his own life in 1959. 

BBB:LHWS #050   Basket Ball started... ...on the day James Naismith nailed 13 rules to a gymnasium door in Springfield Massachusetts. The game spread quickly, especially among college men (and women). University of Pennsylvania was an early adapter, and four Penn grads made their names in basketball. Ellwood Rutschman was a decent player but found his niche as the first professional basketball ref...

ABC:LHS #080-5   Hugh Craig, Jr. ... ...was a successful businessman whose life became the Troop, where he served both as treasurer and as quartermaster. The men loved him, and they still hold a "Hughie's Breakfast" at the conclusion of every deployment. 

ABC:LHS #080-4   Joseph Lapsley Wilson... ...is better remembered today for his arboretum than his troop membership. It still exists today as the Barnes Arboretum at St. Joseph's University. He introduced several species of Asian trees to the United States. His portrait by Thomas Eakins hangs in the Armory Museum. 

ABC:LHS #080-3   Archibald Loudon Snowden... ...was a polymath who served as Captain of the Troop, as well as postmaster for the city, supervisor of the Philadelphia mint, ambassador to Spain, along with numerous other roles. His portrait is in the armory dining room, and his descendants entertain millions of people. 

ABC:LHS #080-2   Fairman Rogers... ...lived a life of elegant wealth but made himself useful as an expert in many aspects of science, especially civil engineering. He served briefly as captain of the Troop. He excelled as a coachman, especially when he took his magnificent black and red four-in-hand through Fairmount Park. Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins captured Rogers in a painting that is the...

ABC:LHS #080-1   The First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry... ...or "First City Troop", was organized in 1774 as the Light Horse of the City of Philadelphia, one of the first patriotic military organizations established in the American Revolution. Although part of the National Guard system, it is a free-standing unit with its own uniforms and armory. It has served in virtually every war and skirmi...

ABC:LHS #080   First City Troop, Philadelphia... ...celebrated its semiquincentennial before the country did. Part 1: brief history of the Troop's First 150 years Part 2: Fairman Rogers, the finest coach driver in the land, was painted by Thomas Eakins Part 3: Archibald Loudon Snowden was a late-19th century polymath, an expert in coin minting, the postal service, fire insurance, and Fairmount Par...

BBB:LHWS #049-4  Oscar Rosier... ...had married the prettiest salesgirl in town, who soon bore him a child. But Oscar had a roving eye which was apparently set on his secretary, another beauty and purported friend of his wife. It did not end well for anyone. 

BBB:LHWS #049-3   Captain Clayton Erb... ...decided to marry and produce an heir at age 50 and selected a young divorcee to serve as mistress of his Red Gables estate in Delaware County. When the woman's sister got involved, things went sour in a hurry. The court case revealed the mansion had been a house of horrors. 

BBB:LHWS #049-2   John Hobbs... ...knew he was being stalked and told his brother that if he didn't leave town soon, he would be a dead man. He was proven right when the woman he was avoiding caught up with him at the train station. 

BBB:LHWS #049-1   Intimate Partner Violence... ...dates to pre-biblical times and violence against women was sanctioned by laws until only recently. Up to 40% of all homicides involve a domestic partner. Men tend not to report abuse when it happens, although attitudes are changing. The adage that “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them" is sometimes reversed....

BBB:LHWS #049    Wives Kill for varying reasons John Hobbs was stalked and shot at a railway station in 1891 by a spurned lover. CPT Clayton Erb was shot and killed, either by his wife or his sister-in-law, during one of many knockdown drag-out battles that had occurred in the brief marriage at the Red Gables mansion in Delaware County. In 1922, businessman Oscar Rosier and his secretary Jerry wer...

ABC:LHS 079-5   The tale of the arsenic widows... ...of Philadelphia will never be told fully. Hundreds of men may have died at their hands. Two of the women who looked the guiltiest were saved from a life in prison by brilliant African American defense attorney Raymond Pace Alexander (BBB:LHWS #005).

ABC:LHS #079-4   Victor "Babe" Andreoli... ...was raised in East Falls in a large, hardworking family, but fell in with bad company. After a botched robbery attempt, he was sentenced to life at Eastern State Penitentiary. His escape in a laundry truck did not end well.

ABC-079, part 3   Willie was one of six brothers in the crime business. They never bothered to affiliate with the Mafia, but three of the six brothers were picked off during gang wars. Willie was one of the victims.