WHITBY HALL 
A VANISHING LANDMARK OF PHILADELPHIA 
By Edwin Bateman Morris 
O N Fifty-eighth Street, between Balti¬ 
more Avenue and the Darby road, 
there is an old house which antedates the 
Stamp Act. It is now making a last pathetic 
fight against the irresistible tide of “civic 
improvements,” which has threatened for a 
decade to submerge it. Resting amid a 
clump of trees that were alive before tbe city 
crossed the river, it defies the asphalt streets 
and the rows of operation houses. But one 
feels instinctively that it is being crowded 
out. Five years ago it was in the country. 
Twenty-five years ago it was half a day’s 
journey from Phila¬ 
delphia. Now they 
have torn up the old 
corduroy road and 
put down a double 
trolley track in its 
place; they have run 
a street across the 
front lawn and turned 
a sewer into the little 
stream that babbles 
behind the house; 
and on the other side 
of the trolley tracks 
another street is now 
waiting the word to 
plunge into the grove 
of trees and draw up 
beside the side porch. 
It is the old story of 
the helpless resistance 
of the last patrician 
square of real country 
against the advance of 
urban improvement. 
Streets and sewers 
and trolley tracks are 
not to be turned aside 
by the remembrance 
of robins and butter¬ 
flies. When a coun¬ 
try house, backed by 
never so much per¬ 
sonal attractiveness 
and old-time association, finds itself in the 
flood-tide of civilization, no sentiment will 
save it—for an advanced rate of interest on 
the original investment is an unanswerable 
argument. 
The house is called “Whitby Hall,” after 
Whitby in England, and was erected in 1754 
by a certain Captain Coultas. He had 
built himself a frame house on the site as 
early as 1741, which has been replaced by a 
part of the present structure. After his 
death the house passed into the hands of a 
very notable figure in Philadelphia—George 
Grey, the owner of 
Grey’s ferry and the 
old mansion on the 
Schuylkill, “Sans 
Souci.” There is every 
reason to suppose that 
Grey had Washing¬ 
ton himself, whom he 
knew well, to visit 
him in the old house, 
but somewhat un¬ 
fortunately there is 
no proof of it. Grey 
came into possession 
of the house by marry¬ 
ing a niece of Captain 
Coultas’s. It is very 
interesting to note 
that before this lady, 
who was born in 
England, came to 
America, she studied 
medicine as a prep¬ 
aration for the wild 
and rigorous life here, 
where she supposed a 
physician was an un¬ 
heard-of convenience. 
The plan of the 
house is simplicity 
itself—of the sort 
which is arrived at by 
placing one room of 
a given width in a 
DOORWAY UNDER STAIRS 
