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.