All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories

BBB:LHWS 062   “Guests of Edwin Forrest”... ...a gravestone inscription at Laurel Hill West opens a story of theatrical lives and a home made possible by an actor’s bequest. Follow Forrest’s legacy from Springbrook to Parkside and Englewood, meeting Frank and Stella Chapman, Laura Palmer, Bram Nossen, A. J. Pocock, and Charlotte Fairchild along the way. From Shakespeare to early television and corporate musicals, their stories reveal a changing profession – and an enduring need for care, companionship, and a place to call home.

ABC:LHS 092-4     Ferdinand Hassler ... ...was a Swiss immigrant with a passion for precision. As Lewis & Clark explored the interior of the new continent, Hassler was doing the painfully slow accurate mapping of the coastline. When he got tired of inaccuracies in trying to duplicate measurements, he established the standard for weights & measures that the country uses to this day. He is celebrated as both the founder of NOAA and the Bureau of Weights and Measures. 

ABC:LHS 092-3    Thomas Ustick Walter ... ... was a classical architect who followed in the footsteps of Jefferson. Locally he remembered for Girard College and Moyamensing Prison, but the world knows his work as the architect for the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

ABC:LHS 092-2 Jonathan Williams ... ... was Benjamin Franklin's grandnephew who learned much from his elder relative. When Thomas Jefferson reluctantly established the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1802, Williams is the man he trusted to establish its goals and traditions. His imposing portrait by Thomas Sully greets you in the Early American galleries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

ABC:LHS 092-1   Hugh Mercer’s... ...life took him from Culloden to Princeton, across an ocean and through two rebellions. A Scottish physician driven into exile, he rebuilt his life on the Pennsylvania frontier and in Virginia before becoming one of George Washington’s trusted generals. This episode separates the man from the legends, following Mercer as doctor, soldier, and Revolutionary martyr. It also traces his afterlife in monuments, paintings, place-names—and the Laurel Hill memorial that became the logo of All Bones Considered.

ABC:LHS 092     Thomas Jefferson ... ... had enough connections in Philadelphia that more than a score are buried at Laurel Hill. General Hugh Mercer, MD, was a good friend to Washington, but his influence on all the Founding Fathers was inescapable. He died from the Battle of Princeton. Jonathan Williams was not a military man, yet Jefferson trusted him to establish a United States Military Academy that would not be a threat to the government. Thomas Ustick Walter shared a first name and a passion for classical architecture. Walter's massive Capitol Dome has become an iconic symbol of our nation. Ferdinand Hassler was the Swiss immigrant whose passion for precision made him the perfect developer of two essential services - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations and the Bureau of Weights and Measures.  Four stories of determination and persuasion in the early days of the Republic.   

BBB:LHWS #061   Horses and foxhunting... ... can be traced from medieval hunting forests to the horse country of Philadelphia’s Main Line. Discover how hounds, riders, breeders, and civic-minded families shaped the Devon Horse Show and the region’s enduring equestrian culture. Along the way, meet the Laurel Hill figures whose stories connect centuries of sport, society, and stewardship—culminating in the unforgettable legacy of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro.

ABC:LHS 091-5    Frank Reed Whiteside... ...was an artist and instructor at PAFA who was inexplicably assassinated when he answered his front door one evening. Despite many maddeningly tempting clues, his case remains unsolved nearly a century later.

ABC:LHS 091-4    Jacqueline Powell... ...was only 10 years old when her mother Emily Lippincott Powell shot her in sleep and then tried to take her own life. Emily spent the rest of her life in Friends Hospital. 

ABC:LHS 091-3    George Boehm... ...was a workman on the Baldwin floor in 1870 when a quarrel with a co-worker led to his own death from a crushed skull and his assailant's trial and imprisonment. This segment walks you through the justice system of 1870s Philadelphia.