Stenton

08/28/2026

Spice Box
Walnut; pine
Unknown Maker
Philadelphia
1700-1720
Courtesy of the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel; bequest of Maria Dickinson Logan to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in memory of Albanus Charles Logan, 1939.

The original owner of this spice box could have been James Logan or Isaac Norris. Please observe that Maria Dickinson Logan wanted all to know she was the box’s final family owner, leaving her name and Loudoun address on the rear upper and lower cases, and her name on the jelly label on the back of a small drawer! This spice chest compares closely to another in the McNeil collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

08/26/2026

Join Stenton at the History on the Street block party on Saturday, August 29th at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania! This community event will feature:

🍽️ Food trucks
🛍️ Local cultural organizations
📜 Curated document display & more!

Open to all, History on the Street is the perfect way to close out the nation’s 250th summer celebration and get inspired and excited for what’s next!

🚨 HISTORY ON THE STREET IS BACK 🚨

Save the date: August 29!

National History Day Philly and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania are teaming up to host History on the Street: Back to School Edition!

Join us at 13th and Locust for an end-of-summer celebration for the whole family. Kick off your school year with hand-on activities and some of our favorite local cultural orgs. Plus: food, music, and fun.

📅 Saturday, August 29 (rain or shine)
🕒 12 pm - 4 pm
📍 13th and Locust Streets, Philadelphia, PA 19107
🎟️ FREE
🔗 https://hsp.org/calendar/history-street-back-school-edition

08/21/2026

Charles Norris (1712-1766)
By Gustavus Hesselius
Oil on canvas
18 ¼” x 16” (canvas)
Courtesy of the Loudoun Collection, Fairmount Park

This smaller than typical format, porthole portrait of Charles Norris is hanging in the stairwell at Stenton along with larger portraits of his brother Samuel and a second portrait of him. We cannot help but wonder if one of the two Charleses might be their brother Isaac, the Speaker, for whom no Hesselius portrait survives. Maria Dickinson Logan (d.1939) had labeled this small portrait Charles, but she was not right about everything.

08/14/2026

Stool
Walnut
Unknown Maker
Philadelphia
1700-1715
Courtesy of the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel; Bequest of Maria Dickinson Logan to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in memory of Albanus Charles Logan, 1939.

When he was twenty five, James Logan arrived in Philadelphia in 1699 as William Penn’s Provincial Secretary. We most often think of Logan as the wealthy merchant and influential official he became over decades; however, as a young man, he sold books to pay his passage across the Atlantic. One can imagine Logan in his early years, living at the Slate Roof House with Penn and fellow merchants, Samuel Carpenter, Isaac Norris and William Trent, perhaps purchasing this stool as his bachelor seating. The later leather upholstery was removed and cane restored in 1999 for the PMA Worldly Goods exhibition.

08/07/2026

James Logan (1674-1751)
Oil on canvas
Gustavus Hesselius (1682-1755)
Philadelphia
c.1730
Courtesy of the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel. Bequest of Maria Dickinson Logan to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in memory of Albanus Charles Logan, 1939

James Logan wrote to his brother Doctor William in Bristol, England, “We have a Swedish painter here, no bad hand, who generally does justice to the men, especially to their blemishes, which he never fails shewing in the fullest light, but is remarked for never having done any [justice] to ye fair s*x, and therefore very few care to sitt to him.”

James Logan to William Logan, 30 or 31st 3 mo. 1733. Volume 8 Logan Family Papers Collection 379, Letter book, Volume IV, page 331; also found in Richard Saunders, “The Development of Painting in Early Pennsylvania,” in Jack Lindsey, 'Worldly Goods', PMA, 1999, page 56.

Note that the 'Worldly Goods' catalog misattributed the 1831 Thomas Sully portrait of Logan belonging to The Library Company of Philadelphia to Hesselius. The Library Company catalog record indicates that Sully copied the portrait of James Logan, then “in the possession of Mrs. D[eborah]. Logan of Stenton” in 1831. The Stenton probate inventories, recorded after the deaths of the first two generation owners, do not include portraits, so where the paintings may have hung in the house is uncertain. Reading confirmation from LCP that the Hesselius portrait was at Stenton during the third generation’s habitation is gratifying.

08/03/2026

Last week, The Clay Studio’s artist Dennis Ritter and historical archaeologist Teagan Schweitzer, Ph.D. presented about art and archeology at Stenton! Then, visitors participated in a special cellar and foodways tour and explored Dennis Ritter’s “A Place Within”, now on view in Stenton’s landscape.

07/31/2026

Salver
Silver
William Paradise, Silversmith
London, UK
1726
Courtesy of the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel, source unknown, engraving similar to other objects given to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania by Maria Dickinson Logan

This salver belonged to Dr. William and Anne Parsons Logan. Dr. Logan, who lived on Castle Green in Bristol, England, was one of the first Physicians elected to the Bristol Royal Infirmary on May 20th, 1737. William Nicholas, a lad whom the Logans employed, was dissatisfied with his wages. "… as he sat opposite to Mrs. Logan at Meeting one Sunday, it entered his head that he would poison the family. He obtained a quantity of arsenic, and watching his opportunity, in the absence of his fellow servant, threw it into the chocolate and served it up [possibly on this salver] for their breakfast." Both Dr. and Mrs. Logan became violently ill, Nicholas was apprehended and committed to Newgate Prison. Mrs. Logan lingered a few months and then died in January of 1748. Dr. Logan survived with shattered health for ten years. Nicholas was tried at the Guildhall "at the Assizes of Oyer and Terminer, on Wednesday, April 6th, 1748, was found guilty of murder and was executed at St. Michael's Hill Gallows on April 22nd."

G. Munro Smith, History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, 1856, page 266.

07/27/2026

There are a few spots left for this Friday's 'Honoring Labor and Foodways: Discovering Places Within and Places Underground' program. Space is limited, so please RSVP here: https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/stenton/honoring-labor-and-foodways-discovering-places-within-and-places-underground

This program will combine consideration and examination of archeology and art through Teagan Schweitzer's archeological research and Dennis Ritter's installation 'Another Place Within', part of The Clay Studio's Radical Americana. For a sneak peak, check out the Clay Studio's interview with artist Dennis Ritter and Stenton Curator Laura Keim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaYrqk4HIqQ

Come with us as we visit Stenton House, a Radical Americana exhibit...

07/24/2026

This week we post portraits of James Logan’s brother and his wife, which in 1733 Dr. William Logan sent to James and Sarah Logan as gifts. We know the paintings hung at Stenton.

Dr. William (1686-1757) and Anne Parsons Logan (murdered 1748)
Oil on canvas
Unknown British artist
Likely Bristol, UK
1733
Courtesy of the Loudoun Collection, Fairmount Park
Recent stabilization and conservation by Steven B. Erisoty, funded by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art

On the 30th or 31st, 5th month [June] 1733, James Logan wrote to his brother Dr. William Logan of Bristol to acknowledge receipt of these paintings.

“… thine and sisters pictures arrived [at Stenton] tolerably safe tho the canvas of the latter w[hi]ch as is mostly in lighter Colours & less Shaded could worse bear it, is in divers places a little broken. A more acceptable Present than these, it could never have entered thy thoughts to send us, My wife and Daughters often wished for them, and are now almost transported in being blest with them. I must own also they are pleasing to me both as I never knew my Sister in person, and as thine shews thee so much improved by wedlock, for thou was much thinner when I last saw thee.”

Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Logan Family Papers Collection 379, Volume 8, James Logan letter book, Volume IV, page 31.

We will share more about this couple next week…

07/17/2026

Provenance is Paramount

Logan and related family artifacts constitute Stenton’s number one collecting and furnishing priority. In celebration of LOGANIA 250, we are delighted to share with you, week-by-week, many family objects lately on loan from Fairmount Park’s Loudoun Collection and the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel that address this priority and set the stage for a visually rich and materially deep telling of Stenton’s history. While we continue researching these objects, we will post what we know. We will be interested in your comments and thoughts along the way.

Loudoun is a Federal and Greek Revival-style house on Germantown Avenue near Apsley Street, built in 1801 for Thomas Wright Armat (1776-1806) from Loudoun County, Virginia. Armat’s granddaughter, Anna Armatt (1820-1895), married Gustavus George Logan (1815-1876) of Stenton, uniting the two wealthy lower Germantown families. Their children, Frances (F***y) Armatt Logan (1854-1898), Albanus Charles Logan (1850-1930), Maria Dickinson Logan (1857-1939), and Jane Caroline Armatt Logan (1859-1924), inherited many of the objects we will feature in these posts. Albanus and Maria (pronounced ‘Mariah’) both lived in Loudoun (very separately) until their deaths. In 1939, Maria bequeathed Loudoun and its contents to the City of Philadelphia to operate as a historic house museum in her mother’s memory. Lighting struck Loudoun in 1993 causing a fire, devastating enough to close the museum forever. Many of the objects survived in the house, while others were rescued and conserved by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A number of the Atwater Kent Collection objects formerly belonged to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, given or bequeathed by Maria as well. Through a 1999 agreement, the HSP transferred about 12,000 artifacts to the Philadelphia History Museum, which closed in 2018. Drexel University began a process to document the collection in 2022 and is now lending objects to area museums and institutions for placement in the public eye. We hope you will plan a visit to Stenton in coming months to see these objects for yourselves.

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We begin with an image of Stenton itself.

Isaac L. Williams (1817-1895)
Stenton
1876
Oil on canvas
Gift of the artist and Townsend Ward in 1877, Courtesy of the Atwater Kent Collection at Drexel University/The Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection.
12 ¾” x 21 ¾”

This Centennial painting of Stenton depicts the rear yard and the service wing behind the house and offers an impression of some of the mature trees that were likely planted in the later 18th century. We can see the tops of the spruce-like conifers in front of the house, elms and cedars at the left, and a pair of sycamores along the piazza outside the kitchen and laundry. Composed with a Victorian-era nostalgic and sentimental tone, this painting tells us about how the landscape functioned in the late 19th century, when the Logan family no longer inhabited Stenton but continued to visit the property, then lived in and farmed by tenants. We see two male figures along the road, one maybe looking after the cows meandering ahead of him. Perhaps Williams’ inspiration for this painting was Townsend Ward’s 1880s series "The Germantown Road and its Associations” published in HSP’s Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.