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Unquestionably the most notable mansion of hewn stone in Greater Philadelphia is Cliveden, the countryseat of the Chew family, located in extensive grounds at Germantown Avenue and Johnson streets, Germantown.
Others desiring to live more nearly in the manner of their English forbears in the mother country chose to make an elaborate countryseat their year-round place of residence.
Woodford, however, located in the Northern Liberties, Fairmount Park, at York and Thirty-third streets, is fairly representative of the type of Georgian countryseat of brick, so many of which were erected in the suburbs of Philadelphia about the middle of the eighteenth century.
One of the noblest old ledge-stone mansions of the vicinity is The Woodlands, located on high ground along the bank of the Schuylkill River in Blockley Township, West Philadelphia. It was formerly the countryseat of the Hamilton family, from which a district of West Philadelphia east of Fortieth Street and south of Market Street took the name of Hamilton Village.
Barradine's town mansion stood in a commanding corner position, with its front door in the side street; and from the glimpse that Dale obtained of its hall, its staircase, and its vast depth, he judged that it was quite worthy of the owner of that noble countryseat, the Abbey House. The servants were at first doubtful as to the propriety of admitting him.
One of the most interesting and attractive of the ancestral homes still standing, in this vicinity, is the Greenough mansion, finely situated on the curve of Centre and South streets. It has an air of dignity and spaciousness which many a more portentous modern countryseat fail to match.
Except the members of his own family, he but seldom invites any guests, nor has Madame Joseph those regular assemblies and circles which Madame Napoleon and Madame Louis Bonaparte have. His hospitality is, however, greater at his countryseat Morfontaine than at his hotel here.
The great twenty-four-paned ranging windows have heavy paneled shutters on the first floor and blinds on the second. Tall, slender, engaged columns supporting a nicely detailed entablature frame a typical Philadelphia doorway, the paneled door itself being single with a handsome leaded fanlight above. Loudoun was built in 1801 by Thomas Armat as a countryseat for his son, Thomas Wright Armat.
At Stenton, the countryseat of James Logan, to which detailed reference has been made in a previous chapter, there is a hall and staircase arrangement such as can be found only in some of the earliest eighteenth-century country houses.
This was regarded as not entirely sufficient by the wealthier families, which considered country living essential to health, comfort and pleasure, and so maintained two establishments, a town house for winter occupancy and a countryseat as a summer retreat.
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