Whitemarsh Hall

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The beautiful Whitemarsh Hall in all of its former glory.

Whitemarsh Hall was a huge estate located on 300 acres (1.2 km²) of land in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania, USA, and owned by banking executive Edward T. Stotesbury and his wife, Eva.

Built by renowned architect Horace Trumbauer between 1916 and 1921, the mansion consisted of 6 stories (3 of which were partly or fully underground), 147 rooms, 45 bathrooms, 100,000 square feet (9,300 m²), and specialty rooms including a ballroom, gymnasium, movie theatre, and even a refrigerating plant. It had been a wedding present from Stotesbury to his second wife, Eva.

The mansion was lavishly decorated with statues, paintings, and tapestry Stotesbury had collected over the years, a collection later displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The furniture was purchased from France and the floor was lined with exquisite Oriental rugs, under the guidance of the famous art dealer Joseph Duveen. Duveen also advised Stotesbury in art purchases to decorate the huge mansion. The gardens and landscaping were designed by the great urbanist and architect Jacques Gréber. The estate also included several lesser houses and utility buildings spread over the 300 acres (1.2 km²), as well as four large greenhouses for growing trees and ferns. Smaller greenhouses were used for growing the many flowers needed to decorate the house for the lavish parties the Stotesburies liked to host. More than 70 gardeners worked at maintaining the grounds. The inside staff usually numbered forty, but many of them would follow the Stotesburies as they made their yearly pilgrimages to their Florida mansion, El Mirasol, for the winter and to Wingwood House, their mansion in Bar Harbor, Maine for the summer.

Whitemarsh Hall had often been called the "American Versailles", because of attention to detail in the gardens and in the main building. The nickname wasn't meant to elevate Whitemarsh Hall to the level of Versailles however.

For about nine years the mansion was the site of lavish balls and receptions. The intensity of the party life dropped a bit after the depression in 1929, and fell even more after 1933 when the Stotesburies were openly criticized for enjoying a life of splendour while most of the country suffered the hardships of the Great Depression.

Eva Stotesbury discovered, after the death of her husband in 1938, that she was relatively broke. Stotesbury had once declared that it cost him over a million dollars a year to maintain the house and the extensive property surrounding it. As a result of the Great Depression, the value of Whitemarsh Hall was significantly lowered. Eva closed the mansion and moved to one of her other mansions, El Mirasol in Palm Beach, Florida. She donated the two mile (3 km) long, eight foot tall steel fence to the War Department to be turned into metal for 18,000 guns.

During much of the war the property was used for warehousing the bulk of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art art treasures as it was feared that the Nazis would bombard Manhattan from U-boots. Eva Stotesbury had already put the property on the market after her husband's death, but there were no buyers. The property did not sell until 1943.

The mansion was sold for $167,000 to the Pennwalt Chemical Corporation to make into a research laboratory. 20 years later, in 1963, Pennwalt built a new research center in the King of Prussia area and moved out of Whitemarsh Hall. The property was neglected and vandalised over the following years.

After being demolished in 1980, modern homes were built around the area. Some small remnants of the huge gardens still exist today. There is a fountain, several statues, pieces of low concrete fence and the concrete gazebo-like structure with stairs. It was part of the garden, facing the back of the home. The main entrance which was one mile (1.6 km) from the back of Whitemarsh Hall still remains, without the steel gates. The gate house also remains on Douglas Road off Willow Grove Avenue.