June 5, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Hill historian pens Mt. Airy retrospective
by Thomas H. Keels

Elizabeth Farmer Jarvis’ Mt. Airy.

“I don’t call myself a historian,” Elizabeth Farmer Jarvis admits.  “I call myself a curator.  There is a difference.” 

For someone who doesn’t consider herself a historian, Liz (as she is universally known) is putting on one heck of an act.  In June, her third pictorial history of Northwest Philadelphia, Mount Airy, will be released by Arcadia Publishing.  Arcadia was also the publisher of Jarvis’ previous books, Chestnut Hill (co-authored with the writer of this article in 2002) and Chestnut Hill Revisited (2004). 

Besides her writing, Liz Jarvis has served as curator of the Chestnut Hill Historical Society (CHHS) since 1993.  She has also advised other local institutions like the Awbury Arboretum on how to preserve and manage their historical collections.   As a board member, she has lent her expertise to Wyck, the Germantown Historical Society, and the Springfield Township Historical Society.  On an individual level, she has labored to save personal photos and letters from destruction, preserving the ephemera that paint a picture of daily life in decades past.  For many people, Liz Jarvis personifies historic preservation in Chestnut Hill. 

A native of Lancaster, Jarvis attended college in Virginia and then obtained an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from George Washington University.  After stints at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, she returned to Pennsylvania to work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  In 1983, she became curator of the museum collection at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 

In 1992, Jarvis left the Historical Society to become an independent consultant.  Her first free-lance job was a six-month position at the Chestnut Hill Historical Society, organizing its collections.  “The president at the time, Louise Strawbridge, told me, ‘I can’t make you any promises, I don’t know if we’ll have any money at the end of six months,’” Jarvis recalls.  “I just didn’t leave!” 

Under Jarvis, the CHHS archives have grown from a relatively small library to a comprehensive collection of more than 15,000 items documenting Chestnut Hill’s history from the 17th century to the present.  Jarvis now manages one full-time employee and nine volunteers who process historical materials and handle research requests.  Much of this phenomenal growth has been due to Jarvis’ outreach.  Through her efforts, CHHS has acquired the collections of many local organizations, both existing and defunct, including the Philadelphia Cricket Club, the Stevens School, and the Chestnut Hill Community Centre, in addition to numerous business and personal archives.             

Jarvis has even resorted to trash-picking to rescue local history.  One day, a doctor showed up at CHHS with old photographs of three little girls with huge bows in their hair.  They were childhood pictures of an elderly woman he was treating and her two sisters.  “She was moving to a nursing home and he saw that all of her possessions were being thrown out,” Jarvis recalls.  “He said, ‘I just could not see these put out on the curb.’  And I said, ‘You mean there’s more?  Can we go get them?’”  Jarvis and the doctor went to the woman’s home and rescued two large garbage bags of photographs and other documents from the garbage truck.  Today, the woman’s personal history is part of the CHHS archives.  “We were her legacy,” Jarvis explains, “and we were going to keep her story alive.” 

In 2002, Jarvis co-authored Chestnut Hill, using her encyclopedic knowledge of local archives to select images that illustrated the community’s evolution over three centuries.  The book’s success (it is still in print after six years) led to a second volume, Chestnut Hill Revisited.  Besides proving popular with readers, both books have raised a significant amount of money for CHHS, their sponsor.  

Soon after Chestnut Hill Revisited was published, Jarvis got the inspiration for her latest book.  “I was at Mt. Airy Day with Chestnut Hill Revisited, in a little booth for the Historical Society.  People would come up and say, ‘Oh, one of those books with the sepia covers!  Have you finally done Mount Airy?’  And I would say, no, I’ve done another Chestnut Hill book.  It got me thinking that there’s never been a book exclusively on Mount Airy.  I wanted to see what was unique about Mount Airy, how it became what it is today.” 

When Jarvis began work on Mount Airy in 2006, she knew she was leaving her comfort zone.  Unlike her previous books, Mount Airy was not sponsored by CHHS, leaving Jarvis responsible for funding the project.   “This was really a labor of love,” she acknowledges.  “It’s harder to get a handle on Mount Airy because it’s so diverse.  There was a lot more that I didn’t know because I didn’t live there.” 

Unlike Chestnut Hill, which developed as a separate community, Mount Airy was “blended” with the village of Germantown to its south.  (Even today, some people consider Mount Airy’s southern border to be Johnson Street while others think it ends at Washington Lane).  Much of the land in what became Mount Airy was originally “side lands,” farm acreage given to Germantown property owners. 

While Mount Airy was home to some large estates (its name comes from the William Allen estate, now the site of the Lutheran Theological Seminary), it remained a community of working farms throughout the 19th century.  Many photographs in Mount Airy bear witness to this enduring rural atmosphere.  An 1839 daguerreotype of Cliveden shows the front lawn (where the Battle of Germantown is reenacted every October) covered by an apple orchard.  On the book’s cover, a flock of sheep trot down Germantown Avenue, obscuring the trolley tracks in the middle of the road. 

By the early 20th century, planned developments had appeared on both sides of Germantown Avenue: Sedgwick Farms and Cliveden Park to the east, and Pelham to the west.  Many city-dwellers flocked to this second “suburb in the city,” including a sizable Jewish population.  While non-Gentiles were actively discouraged from settling in conservative Chestnut Hill, fewer restrictions existed in Mount Airy. 

This early diversity may explain why Mount Airy, unlike much of Philadelphia, integrated peacefully in the 1950s and 1960s.  Community and religious leaders banded together to prevent white flight, and to fight banks and realtors attempting to red-line their neighborhood.  White residents held teas to welcome their new African-American neighbors.  Black and white parents created what may have been the first integrated day camp in Philadelphia, as well as an arts program for children which evolved into the Allens Lane Art Center.  Jarvis ends Mount Airy in the early 1960s, when the community was attracting national attention for its grass-roots activism. 

Now that Mount Airy is finished, Jarvis is able to spend more time with her husband Andrew, a partner with the architectural firm of EwingCole, and their three children, Judy, Anne and Alex.  Judy, a recent graduate of Vassar who has written for the Chestnut Hill Local, now lives in San Francisco.  Anne is a sophomore at the University of Delaware, while Alex is headed to Skidmore College in the fall. 

Not one to remain idle, however, Jarvis is working on other projects, including the pictorial research for an upcoming history of the Wissahickon.   “I love the interconnectedness of all this,” she explains.  “The Wissahickon project and the Mount Airy project and the two Chestnut Hill books, plus working at CHHS and being on the boards of Germantown Historical Society and Springfield Township Historical Society.  It’s cumulative knowledge, and it makes you a much better curator.  You know a little more each year, and you can put things together.  It keeps you going.”

Elizabeth Farmer Jarvis will discuss her latest book, Mount Airy, at Mt. Airy Author Day on Saturday, June 21 at 2:30 p.m.  The event will be held at the Lovett Library at 6945 Germantown Avenue; call 215-685-2095 for details.