Global Philadelphia visits Woodford Mansion for the final 2025 National Historic Landmark site visit
For Global Philadelphia’s final National Historic Landmark quarterly site visit series of the year, we went to the Woodford Mansion, located in Fairmount Park. The Woodford Mansion is one of several historic buildings throughout Fairmount Park that housed leaders who invested, shaped, and developed the longstanding institutions and innovations of the region.
Woodford Mansion housed William Coleman, original owner and wealthy merchant, George Clymer, signer of the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and may have been visited by Benjamin Franklin, a close friend of Coleman.
We were particularly excited to go to Woodford Mansion during the holidays because of the interior decorations that the team led by Jeff Duncan and Kristen Regina put together for a festive recreation of an 18th-century home. In the front living room, they had a great design implementation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, reflecting some artifacts, outfits, and chachkies from the story to bring a fun and realistic energy to the room.
In the next room, a formal dining space, we saw a re-creation of a high Victorian-style dining table with ornate silver and porcelain decorations. We learned about the imported porcelain from China and the subsequent positive economic impacts on the direct shipping vessel from China to Philadelphia in that time period. The ship, the Empress of China, brought great wealth and prosperity to the City of Philadelphia. We also learned about the various boxes that filled an 18th-century dining room such as a spice box, knife box, tobacco box, and cellarettes, or boxes that held bottles of Dutch Gin.
It was such a treat to visit this amazing historic house in Philadelphia that has various connections to the founding principles and documents of this city and country. As the last site visit of the year, this felt like a hyperlocal location that represented so much about Philadelphia.
To recap the four NHL sites that GPA visited this year; we started at Historic Johnson House, in Germantown, with Cornelia Swinson. We then visited the Seaport Museum, with Alexis Furlong. Following that, we went to Wagner Free Institute, in North Philadelphia, with Susan Glassman, and finally ended at Woodford Mansion, in Fairmount Park, with Jeff Duncan & Kristen Regina. This has been a great year of community building and exploration, and GPA is excited to visit four more sites in 2026.
