In the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was already home to the American Philosophical Society, the Philadelphia Museum established by Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), and a thriving medical community. But the academy founders, members of the city’s growing professional class, felt excluded and poorly represented by the city’s established elite institutions. For its first home, the young academy rented rooms above a milliner at 94 N. Second Street that included meeting space, a reading room, and a room to keep their growing specimen collection. The first major collection acquired by the academy, a large collection of minerals purchased from prominent local geologist and congressman Adam Seybert (1773–1825) in the summer of 1812, provided the basis for the first series of lectures for the members.

While the academy’s founders considered the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the natural world important for its own sake, they also enthusiastically embraced the idea that the study of natural science built character in urban young men and was a patriotic duty that would place the sciences in the young United States on an equal level with those in the Old World. Even though membership was restricted to only those people nominated by two current members, the academy continued to grow. By 1817 it became clear that if it were to take part in the international exchange of scientific theories and discoveries as well as specimens, the academy would need to publish a journal. Scottish-born geologist and academy member William Maclure (1763–1840), a generous donor of money as well as specimens and a large number of volumes for the library, championed the idea most strongly. He was so dedicated to public science education and cooperation that he bought the academy a printing press and housed it in his own home where the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences was published for the first few years. The Journal, and later the Proceedings, became important natural science journals.

A History of Expeditions

In 1812, a mere month after its founding, the academy sponsored its first “expedition” to visit the zinc mines in nearby Perkiomen, Pennsylvania. As it grew in size and prestige it organized, sponsored, and staffed more expeditions, often in collaboration with the federal government and other institutions. Army topographer Major Stephen Harriman Long (1784–1864) led one such expedition in 1819 to the Upper Mississippi Valley, which included academy members Thomas Say and Titian Peale (1799–1885), to study and collect the area’s flora and fauna.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the academy’s amateur naturalists gave way to a more professional membership, reflecting a larger trend in American science. The academy continued to collect specimens from around the world through trade, purchase, donation, and sponsorship of expeditions of exploration. In 1834, it cosponsored an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River with the American Philosophical Society. In 1838 academy members Charles Pickering (1805–78) and Titian Peale, along with several corresponding members, joined the four-year Wilkes Expedition, which explored and surveyed the Pacific Ocean and adjacent land.

The academy’s collection grew quickly throughout the nineteenth century, forcing it to move five times to progressively larger buildings. In 1840 the institution moved to a new, fireproof building at Broad and Sansom Streets where it became one of the most modern, best-equipped natural history museums in the United States. It boasted, among other holdings, the world’s largest ornithological collection. The academy made its final move in 1876, constructing a new building at the corner of Race and Nineteenth Streets, a remote location that later became the heart of Philadelphia’s cultural district. The academy’s location was further enhanced by the creation of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway as the showpiece of the City Beautiful movement in 1917.

A Bent Toward Paleontology

Paleontological work preoccupied the academy during the late nineteenth century, thanks to men such as Joseph Leidy (1823–91) and Edward Drinker Cope (1840–97).  Leidy trained as a medical doctor, taught anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and later Swarthmore College, and was a curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences from 1846 until his death. He described some of the first dinosaur fossils in America and led the field of vertebrate paleontology for most of the nineteenth century. Leidy did some collecting locally, but relied largely on field naturalists such as Cope and Ferdinand Hayden (1829–87) to send fossils from the American West.

Following early successes by men such as Leidy and Hayden, the field of paleontology exploded, and the academy was at its center, not always for the better. The most brilliant and controversial of these later scientists was Edward Drinker Cope. A student of Leidy’s, Cope was talented and ambitious, and after the Civil War he embarked on a number of expeditions of the American West that sent huge numbers of paleontological specimens back to the academy. Unfortunately, Cope maneuvered himself into a petty, and sometimes violent, feud over access to fossil excavation sites, interpretations of specimens, and prestige with fellow paleontologist O.C. Marsh (1831–99) of Yale University, a feud dubbed by many historians as the “Bone Wars.” This feud had important consequences for the academy and Joseph Leidy. Outlandish stories of the feud published in the popular press sullied the academy’s reputation, and Leidy, disgusted by Cope’s behavior and tired of being caught in the middle of the feud, eventually abandoned paleontology in the West and turned his attention to other projects and helping local organizations, including serving as the president of the faculty and head of the museum at the Wagner Free Institute of Science of Philadelphia.

Twentieth Century and Beyond

By the turn of the century, study of natural science began to shift away from museums to university biology labs. However, the academy continued to sponsor expeditions to the Arctic, Asia, Africa, and Central America and conduct original research in several fields. Years before ecology, pollution, and conservation became topics of public debate, in 1947 the academy embarked on a research agenda to study aquatic ecosystems through its Department of Limnology, and in 1948 it established an Environmental Research Division. Throughout the twentieth century, the academy conducted important research in ecology and biodiversity on its own and in partnership with other area institutions.

In 2011 the academy became the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University when it formed an official affiliation with Drexel University. This partnership created a bridge between university-based biological research and museum-based natural history collecting. The relationship combined the institutions’ educational missions and resources and enhanced their ability to collaborate on natural and environmental science research. The affiliation facilitated, among other projects, creation of a joint Department of Biodiversity, Earth, and Environmental Science (BEES) dedicated to research and education in the fields of environmental science, ecology and conservation, biodiversity and evolution, geoscience, and paleontology.

The mission and motto of this new department, “Field Experience, Early and Often,” echoed the interests and ambitions of the founders of the Academy of Natural Sciences. By remaining true to the vision of its founders, America’s oldest institution of natural history remained relevant into the twenty-first century.

Matthew A. White is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Florida. His dissertation, “Patronage, Public Science, and Free Education: William Wagner and The Wagner Free Institute of Science 1855–1929,” was supported by grants from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Philadelphia). He is also a museum professional with over twenty-five years of experience in museums of science, technology, and history, and is the Director of Education at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Private and university-based anatomical courses in Philadelphia dated back to the 1750s. However, the scale of anatomical education took a great leap forward in 1762, when William Shippen Jr. (1736-1808), who had studied medicine in Edinburgh, began a public course of lectures on anatomy, which included human dissections. While any man could attend—women would not be allowed to study medicine until well into the nineteenth century—Shippen intended his course to serve as an introduction to a larger medical education geared toward those interested in a medical career. Within four years, Shippen joined another Philadelphia physician, John Morgan (1735-89), to found the Medical School of the College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania).

In spite of the first medical school emerging from Shippen’s anatomical lectures, the quality of anatomical education for the rest of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century was stymied by limited access to fresh corpses, partially the result of popular opposition to dissection. Public angst about dissection reached a boiling point in 1765 when a mob of sailors interrupted Shippen’s course and marched on his home.  Philadelphians had suspected since his earliest lectures that Shippen had stolen bodies for dissection from a church graveyard, but he explained that he only dissected executed convicts and occasionally a body from the potter’s field, a public graveyard for the poor.  Resistance also came from other physicians. Prominent physician Benjamin Rush (1746-1813) had little respect for anatomy as a standalone discipline and pushed his own physiological system for understanding human health. In Rush’s system, all diseases were caused by states of imbalance in the body, or as Rush put it “a disproportion between excitement and excitability.” Weather, emotional state, or diet, among other influences, caused these imbalances. Rush, a professor of chemistry at the Medical School of the College of Philadelphia from 1769 until his death in 1813, described anatomical study as just “a mass of dead matter. It is physiology which infuses life into it.” Rush rooted his theories in eighteenth-century approaches to medicine, and he significantly influenced medical education in Philadelphia throughout his life.

Following trends in Paris that emphasized pathological anatomy through postmortem dissections to understand disease, the generation of educators after Rush made anatomy the centerpiece of their educational system, which contributed to Philadelphia’s status as the focal point of American medical and scientific thought in the nineteenth century. During this era, with the University of Pennsylvania, Jefferson Medical College, the short-lived Pennsylvania Medical College, and three private supplemental anatomy schools, Philadelphia developed the most robust culture of anatomical education in the United States. Four Philadelphia anatomy professors—Caspar Wistar (1761-1818) of the University of Pennsylvania; William Horner (1793-1853), who succeeded Wistar at the University of Pennsylvania; Horner’s successor Joseph Leidy (1823-91); and Samuel G. Morton (1799-1851) at the Pennsylvania Medical College–wrote anatomy textbooks. Leidy even had his personal copy of his textbook bound in human skin.

One of the major differences between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomical education in Philadelphia and elsewhere was an increasing focus in the nineteenth century on pathological anatomy, popularized by doctors in France.  Pathological anatomists used post-mortem dissections for the purpose of discovering the cause of death and how specific diseases affected the tissues and organs of the body. While physicians had been making post-mortem dissections for centuries, practitioners in the Paris clinics dissected thousands of cadavers and argued that disease could be observed as lesions in the tissue, as opposed to previous theories that considered specific organs as the seats of disease.

During this period, medical schools began to assemble significant anatomy collections in museums featuring objects like diseased organs, human skulls, and animal skeletons. The University of Pennsylvania’s anatomical museum (first assembled by Caspar Wistar from 1808 to 1818 and later part of the Wistar Institute) and the College of Physicians and Surgeons’ Mütter Museum (founded in 1858) represented two of the largest American anatomy museums in the nineteenth century. Many professors also incorporated artifacts from these collections into their classes. Utilizing museum collections and their professors’ lectures, students in Philadelphia learned about comparative anatomy between animals and humans, along with the supposed differential anatomy of the human races. At the University of Pennsylvania, Leidy even told his students that Black and white people were different species. As a result, in addition to its value as a medical subject, the study of anatomy carried social and political implications.

Because Philadelphia housed so many venues for dissection in the nineteenth century, anatomy professors competed for fresh corpses. Anatomists fashioned a secret arrangement with the city government, which gave them open access to potter’s fields. This arrangement yielded approximately 450 corpses per year, but Philadelphia physicians sometimes still had to ship in bodies from New York City. In 1828, Philadelphia anatomists signed a contract to ensure that each professor received a fair portion of available anatomical material, which helped alleviate tension between anatomy teachers.

The city’s most public body-snatching scandal took place in 1882, after gross anatomy had lost its central position in medical pedagogy. In 1882, Jefferson University Professor of Anatomy William Smith Forbes (1831-1905) was publicly tried on charges of stealing six cadavers for his anatomy course from the historically African American Lebanon Cemetery. While Forbes was eventually acquitted, the case revealed a previously little-known Black market in corpses that went back to the beginning of the century. In spite of scandals like the Forbes case, students continued to view dissection as a right of passage. Into the twentieth century, they persisted in a ritual of posing for photographs with cadavers, a practice that underscored the continued influence of anatomy and dead bodies on medical students and their relationship to patients and death.

The study of anatomy and Philadelphia’s role in it rose to the peak of their importance within American medicine in the antebellum era. Even after the rise of German laboratory medicine and the ascendance of germ theory in the 1870s and 1880s made gross anatomy just one subject among many in the medical curriculum, Philadelphia physicians continued to make breakthroughs in histology (microscopic anatomy) and later neurosurgery. Leidy, whose tenure at the University of Pennsylvania lasted from 1853 until his death in 1891, utilized microscopic anatomy in his lectures and for his 1861 textbook. Pathological anatomy continued to be a fruitful area of medical exploration into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although gross anatomy remained important for medical students to learn the structures of the human body through anatomical education, it never again occupied the central theoretical position in medicine as it had in the first half of the nineteenth century.

While gross anatomy fell into the background of American medical education, professors at Philadelphia universities continued to make names for themselves in anatomy-related branches of inquiry, including neuroanatomy and neurosurgery.  At the turn of the twentieth century, the University of Pennsylvania emerged as one of the country’s leading centers for neuroscience. Charles Harrison Frazier (1870-1936) led a cohort of neurosurgeons in Philadelphia who contributed to the creation of the Departments of Neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University. Frazier and William Gibson Spiller (1863-1940) pioneered a new surgical method for treating trigeminal neuralgia and made additional breakthroughs in treating pain in the nervous system. Together these neurosurgeons shaped the future of neuroanatomy and trained the next cohort of the country’s leading neurosurgeons, including Francis Grant (1891-1967) and Robert Groff (1903-75).  Through the neurosciences, Philadelphia continued to maintain a prominent position in the American medical profession, and anatomy continued to occupy a central role in the production of medical knowledge.

Christopher Willoughby is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Tulane University in New Orleans, where in 2012 he also received his master’s.  He is completing his dissertation entitled “Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States,” which has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Philadelphia).  He was the 2014 winner of the W. Curtis Worthington Jr. Prize from the Medical University of South Carolina’s Waring Historical Library, for the best graduate student essay in the history of health science. (Author information current at time of publication.)  

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1353086. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Eighteenth-century almanacs contained various kinds of astronomical data, including schedules of eclipses and sunrise/sunset tables. Some of the more popular Philadelphia imprints included Poor Richard’s Almanack, printed by Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), and Der Hoch-Deutsch Americanische Kalender, printed by Germantown’s Christopher Saur (1693–1758). Almanacs commonly included a Zodiac Man or Man of Signs, an astrological diagram that showed how planets governed specific parts of the human body. Historically, though the practice was on the decline by the eighteenth century, the image was intended to be used in conjunction with the almanac’s astronomical data to diagnose illnesses. However it was used, the relevancy of astronomical information in almanacs was contingent upon one’s geographical location, prompting local residents, notably David Rittenhouse (1732–96), to provide almanac calculations for the vicinity of Philadelphia.

David Rittenhouse was a celebrated early American astronomer whose work on the 1769 transit of Venus brought him transatlantic fame. A transit of Venus occurs when the orbit of Venus passes between the sun and the earth, a rare though predictable phenomenon that occurs twice separated by a gap of roughly eight years after a longer gap of over one hundred years. Not to miss a literal once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the American Philosophical Society organized a committee consisting of Rittenhouse, William Smith (1727–1803), John Lukens (1720?–89), and John Sellers to take observations in Norriton, near Rittenhouse’s home. A second observatory was constructed in the State House Garden. The Royal Society of London published Rittenhouse’s delineation of the transit, and the American Philosophical Society released an account of the committee’s doings in the first issue of its Transactions, in 1773. This work was met with approval from European scientists. Rittenhouse supplied local astronomers, often using his mechanical talents to make complex and beautiful astronomical instruments. In addition to crafting some of the equipment for the observatories at Norriton and the State House, he made two orreries, mechanical devices for studying the movement of planets, for the College of New Jersey in 1770 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1771.

School Observatories

Local colleges and universities maintained a number of impressive observatories between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, but a Philadelphia city high school became one of the most technologically advanced institutions in the country in 1837. The city set aside $50,000 for the establishment of Central High School, which included $10,000 to build and furnish an astronomical observatory and library. Sharon Female Academy, founded by John Jackson (1809–55) in nearby Darby, seeking to emulate Central High, acquired a similar observatory and telescope.

Use of telescopes was not exclusive to observatories. Popular speakers used telescopes to teach astronomy in lyceum halls. In the 1840s, Irish lecturer Dionysius Lardner (1793–1859) offered his take on the theory of “The Plurality of Worlds,” an early argument for extraterrestrial life, while traveling through Philadelphia. The argument posited that if God had made other planets, they must be inhabited. Through Lardner’s performances telescopes became a means of visualizing intelligent design.

Popular thirst for astronomical knowledge, coupled with school curricula, encouraged local markets for textbooks and scientific instruments. Ezra Otis Kendall (1818–99), who taught at Philadelphia High School, authored Uranography and Atlas of the Heavens, which appeared in various editions in the 1840s and 1850s. The latter contained maps of stars and constellations. Kendall preferred color-printed star charts that depicted white stars on a blue field because he felt this better represented the nature of the heavens, Kendall’s charts also eschewed fanciful representations of constellations that confused his students. Fellow Philadelphian, Henry Whitall (1819–87), in Treatise on Fixed Stars (1850), followed suit. Testimonials for Whitall’s charts suggest that they were used by pupils of various ages, male and female alike. Women, too, wrote astronomy texts. Hannah M. Bouvier (1811–70), a resident of Crosswicks, New Jersey, wrote her Familiar Astronomy, a Philadelphia imprint, in 1855. The fifth part of her work dealt with practical astronomy, or the use of astronomical instruments. Philadelphians could visit local manufacturing companies, including McAllister & Brothers and James W. Queen & Co. These companies made telescopes, celestial globes, and various astronomical tools and glass lenses. In the 1870s and 1880s, James W. Queen & Co. advertised Henry Whitall’s “Moveable Planispheres,” large printed or brightly painted paper disks that could be rotated to determine visible stars for a particular time and date.

Other Astronomical Societies

Philadelphia’s culture of astronomy spawned a number of popular astronomical societies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1888, residents of Philadelphia and Camden met in New Jersey to found the Camden Astronomical Society, one of the oldest amateur astronomy clubs in the country. Edmund Read Jr. (1859–1923), a Camden businessman, became its first president. For the first thirty-five years, the society held its meetings at Read’s house. In 1927, it became the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society, meeting at the Sproul Observatory, built in 1906, at Swarthmore College. Newly renamed, the society, with the cooperation of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, American Philosophical Society, and other area institutions, did much to promote the bicentennial of Rittenhouse’s birth in 1932, including establishing the Rittenhouse Medal, an award for outstanding achievement in astronomy. When the Franklin Institute opened a museum on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the society began to meet there, taking advantage of the new Fels Planetarium and Institute Observatory. Other local societies included the West Jersey Astronomical Society (founded 1967) and student-run societies at colleges and universities, such as the Physics and Astronomy Club at the University of Pennsylvania.

Well-established scientific institutions ushered in popular interest in astronomy, too. In the late twentieth century, Derrick Pitts (b. 1955) transformed the Franklin Institute’s astronomical programs. Pitts began working at the Franklin Institute as a college student in 1978 and became chief astronomer in 1990. Pitts was influential in creating the “Space Command” permanent exhibit, which provided children a hands-on experience with astronomical artifacts. In 2004, Science Spectrum magazine named Pitts one of the fifty most important African Americans in research science. In 2008, Pitts became the host of SkyTalk on WHYY Radio, a weekly broadcast of astronomical news made accessible for a popular audience. He became a NASA Ambassador in 2009. Pitts, the Franklin Institute, and the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society held various educational astronomy events during the Annual Philadelphia Science Festival, including a citywide telescope night.

Between the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries, Philadelphians maintained a steady interest in astronomy. Scholars and popular practitioners looked to the sky to answer various questions—medical, religious, philosophical, and scientific—all means of finding their place in the universe.

Jessica Linker is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the recipient of fellowships from a number of Philadelphia-area institutions, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her work focuses on American women and scientific practice between 1720 and 1860. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Athenæum of Philadelphia, a non-profit, member-supported library, was founded in 1814 “to disseminate useful knowledge.”  Threatened for its very existence with the advent of the city’s free library in 1894, the organization subsequently recovered and ultimately thrived as it reinvented itself as a special- collections library with related public exhibitions, lectures, and publications.

Unlike modern tax-supported public libraries, athenæums were private organizations established as associations of dues-paying subscribers or as stock companies—in which the purchase of a share made one an owner.  Early member-supported libraries such as The Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), The Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island (1747), The Charleston Library Society (1748), and The New York Society Library (1754), began appearing in America’s major coastal towns in the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, when neoclassicism was the popular style, member-supported libraries were often named for Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of arts and literature.  This name became synonymous with the term library in towns like Zanesville, Ohio; Keokuk, Iowa; and La Jolla, California, as Americans moved west in the later nineteenth century.

The Athenæum of Philadelphia’s founders were leading citizens of what was then the largest city in the United States, including Chief Justice William Tilghman (1756-1827), Jacob (1788-1856) and Benjamin Gratz, George and Roberts (1786-1836) Vaux, Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), Horace Binney (1780-1875), George Cadwalader (1806-79), and Mathew Carey (1760-1839).   They declared “their first and immediate object” to be “the collection, in some central place, of American and foreign periodical publications of political, literature and science, maps, dictionaries, and other books of reference to which access might be had at all hours of the day.”  Many of the founders were also members of The Library Company and The American Philosophical Society, but neither of these institutions remained open for extended hours, nor did they specialize in periodicals and books of reference.

Early Years

For nearly three decades, the Athenæum occupied the first floor of Philosophical Hall, next to Independence Hall, across Fifth Street from The Library Company of Philadelphia.  These were years when the Athenæum grew rapidly in prestige, membership, and the variety of books and periodicals available to its stockholders. By 1825, Jonathan P. Sheldon of New York declared that every visitor to Philadelphia should go to the Athenæum for “New York has no institution of the kind to compare with it. A comparison of the Libraries of the two cities and especially the situation of each as to pecuniary matters, would place New York far behind her rival in matters of correct taste and liberality.”  The members regularly brought visitors to the rooms, dutifully entering their names in a “Strangers’ Book” kept at the librarian’s desk. These ledgers record visits by John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan and, on October 1, 1825, “General LaFayette,” introduced by “all the members.” The occasion of the Marquis de LaFayette’s visit prompted the members to elect him their first honorary member.

In 1829 William Lehman, a wealthy and bookish druggist, bequeathed $10,000 to the library for “the acquisition of a suitable building.”  However, it would not be until 1845 that a building lot on Sixth Street opposite Washington Square was finally acquired and an architectural competition announced.  Ultimately designs were received from such major Philadelphia architects as William Strickland (1788-1854), Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-87), and John Haviland (1796-1865), but the design adopted and constructed came from a recent Scottish emigrant, John Notman (1810-65), who with his Athenæum design introduced to American the first example of a brownstone Italianate Renaissance palazzo made popular in London by Charles Barry at the Travellers’ Club (1829). The three-story building provided two floors of rental space. Lawyers occupied the ground floor while architects and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania settled on the third floor.  Eventually the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects became a tenant.  The AIA would presage the future by calling for the establishment of an architectural library at the Athenæum.

Today the Athenæum occupies all three stories of the original building as well as another level inserted under the building in the 1970s for additional high-security, temperature- and humidity-controlled collection storage.

For the Athenæum and the other member-supported libraries in the city, the opening of the Free Library of Philadelphia in 1894 was a cataclysmic event.  Operating under the motto Liber Libere Omnibus—Free Books for All—the Free Library effectively undercut Philadelphia’s membership libraries such as the Mercantile Library, which claimed more than 6,000 members and an annual circulation of 140,000 volumes at the time.  The Mercantile Library eventually failed and was absorbed by the Free Library.  At the Athenæum, membership steadily declined, even with the approval for book circulation in 1855, and its modest endowment proved inadequate to properly maintain the building, which also affected rental income.  By the 1920s the board of directors was hiring retired clergymen as caretaker librarians and the future appeared bleak.  Encouraged by the post-World War II urban renewal of Society Hill and the establishment of Independence National Historical Park, the directors hired a succession of younger librarians in the hope of revitalizing a traditional book circulation service, but efforts to increase endowment and raise funds for restoration of the building were generally unsuccessful.

Renaissance

The downward spiral was arrested in the 1960s and 1970s when George Vaux (1908-1996), an energetic direct descendant of an Athenæum founder, was elected president of the board of directors. He replaced inactive board members with scholars and administrators who brought to the table extensive experience with not-for-profit institutions.  Simultaneously he attracted community leaders and generous donors.  The directors then hired their first executive director who was charged with redefining the Athenæum as a special-collections library with related public exhibitions, lectures, and publications, while simultaneously strengthening the traditional membership structure and services.   Substantial sums were raised from individual donors and local and national foundations to hire a professional staff and to restore and expand the National Historic Landmark Athenæum building to provide proper facilities to care for and exhibit the collections.

The new leadership first focused on the extensive collection of rare books and periodicals surviving from the period when the Athenæum had been founded, flourished, and erected its building.  The promising extension of the collection scope to include Victorian material culture prompted an invitation to the newly founded Victorian Society in America to establish its headquarters in the Athenæum building.  Thus the library was overnight introduced to a national audience that attracted the interest of scholars and collectors such as Samuel J. Dornsife (1916-1999), whose lifetime collection of rare design books and trade catalogues devoted to Victorian-era architecture, decorative arts, and interior design, ultimately came to the library where it has provided a rich core of documentary sources for the authentic restorations of Victorian buildings as well as licensed commercial lines of authentic reproduction lighting fixtures, wallpapers, textiles, and paint colors.  Subsequent collecting greatly expanded those holdings.

The Athenæum’s rare book collection originated with a substantial early nineteenth-century gift from Samuel Breck of Sweetbrier (1771-1862), and the time-honored practice of libraries collecting collectors’ collections continued right through to the twenty-first century.  Among the most distinctive donations have been theater historian Irvin R. Glazer’s (1922-96) collection of books on America theater buildings; Robert L. Raley’s architecture and garden design books; former director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Evan Turner’s collection of early books and manuscripts on the history of books and printing dating from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries assembled by his father, Professor Albert Morton Turner; and Eli P. Zebooker’s collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps and prints of Philadelphia.

Emphasis on Architecture

The primary focus of the library’s research collections gradually became American architecture prior to 1930.  Recognizing that no institution in Philadelphia actively collected architectural records or specifically sought to support research on architects and builders, the Athenæum undertook that role in the early 1970s, accumulating over time 220,000 architectural drawings, 300,000 photographs, and supporting documentation representing the work of 26,500 architects and engineers.  Of special interest has been the collection of books known to have been owned or consulted by architects who practiced in the greater Philadelphia region. For that reason the library acquired whenever possible the intact office libraries of early architectural firms as well as their client records and drawings.  One example of such an omnibus acquisition is the office records, library, and drawings of Theophilus P. Chandler (1844-1920), founder of the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture.  The Athenæum also became the official repository of the records of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The Athenæum’s architectural drawing collection has focused primarily on Philadelphia architects and builders ranging from master builders such as William Palmer (1771-1815) and Owen Biddle (1774-1806) to the earliest professional architects: Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), John Haviland (1792-1851), William Strickland (1788-1854), and Robert Mills (1781-1855).  The crown jewel of the nineteenth-century holdings is the complete archive of Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-87).

The twentieth-century architectural holdings are substantial and include sixty thousand drawings representing the career of Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), the office archives of the country-house architects Walter Mellor (1880-1940) and Arthur I. Meigs (1882-1956), the complete archive of the Art Deco theater architect Louis Magaziner (1878-1955), and the office records of the Henry D. Dagit & Sons dynasty, and many others.

Decorative Painters and Craftsmen

The drawings of decorative painters and craftsmen such as stained-glass makers and decorative ironsmiths are more ephemeral than those of architects.  Holdings at the Athenæum include a comprehensive collection of the celebrated stained-glass master, Nicola D’Ascenzo (1871-1953); the archives of the decorative painter George Herzog (1851-1920), who was responsible for Philadelphia City Hall, the Union League Club, and the Masonic Hall; and the New York City artists H.D. & J. Moeller—among others.

In 1999 the Athenæum conceived and the William Penn Foundation funded a cooperative agreement with the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives, the Philadelphia Historical Commission, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, to establish the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project (later renamed the American Architects and Buildings collection) to offer free of charge online access to more than 26,500 biographical essays of architects, engineers, and contractors and information on 270,000 projects and buildings, supported by 135,000 digitized images.

Although begun in 1814 as a reading room for noncirculating books and periodicals, the Athenæum grew over its two centuries of activity to include a thriving lending collection offering both print and e-books, major resources in the history of architecture and the design arts, a mid-nineteenth-century museum collection, and two websites providing research support with both maps and architectural drawings.  Although steeped in new technology, the Athenæum still realizes the noble desire of its founders:  “to disseminate useful knowledge.”

Roger W. Moss is Executive Director Emeritus, the Athenæum of Philadelphia, which he directed  from 1968 to 2008.  Simultaneously he was an adjunct professor in the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is the author of more than a dozen books on architecture and design, including the trilogy Historic Houses of Philadelphia (1998), Historic Sacred Places of Philadelphia (2005), and Historic Landmarks of Philadelphia (2008) published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Barnes’s successful career in the pharmaceutical industry laid the groundwork for his foundation. He built a fortune manufacturing Argyrol, a widely used antiseptic that he developed with German chemist Hermann Hille (1871-1962). While running a factory in West Philadelphia to produce the drug, Barnes introduced the study of philosophy into his employees’ daily schedule. With advice from painter William Glackens (1870-1938), who knew Barnes from their days attending Central High School, Barnes began collecting art to use in his lessons. He launched his foundation with the goal of expanding these experiments in art education.

Barnes actively shaped every aspect of his fledgling organization. In the most tangible sense, he donated his art collection and a recently purchased plot of land in Merion to the foundation. The foundation’s charter and bylaws outlined the terms of these gifts and enumerated detailed guidelines that governed the foundation’s operations. He commissioned noted Beaux-Arts architect Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) to design the institution’s facilities. The foundation’s building, programs, and art collection additionally reflected Barnes’s ongoing interest in African American culture, which grew out of his fascination with music and religious ceremonies he encountered as a child. At times Barnes pursued partnerships with other schools and exhibition spaces in the region, but the foundation remained independent during his lifetime.

Education at the Barnes Foundation began as a pedagogical experiment in the systematic study of art. Barnes believed that learning to look carefully and methodically would grant students access to a deeper, more enriching experience of art. His theory of art education combined concepts of intelligence from psychologist William James (1842-1910), studies of aesthetics from George Santayana (1863-1952), and a philosophy of education and social reform pioneered by John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey’s work was so influential that he was named honorary director of education at the foundation in 1923. Students read texts by these and other thinkers while they learned to visually dissect artworks with particular regard for what Barnes called “plastic form” – line, color, light, and space. In contrast to conventional practices, this technique downplayed other aspects of an artwork such as the artist’s intention, the story told by an image, and the historical circumstances surrounding an object’s creation.

To hone their visual analysis skills, students studied the eclectic objects that hung in the foundation’s galleries. These eventually included masterworks by European modernists such as Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954), over a hundred African sculptures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the largest known array of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). It also featured works by American artists Barnes knew personally, such as Glackens, Charles Demuth (1883-1935), and Horace Pippin (1888-1946). To illustrate various lessons, Barnes installed these items in “wall ensembles”: complex, often symmetrical arrangements of artworks, metalwork (like hinges and dental tools), and in some cases, furniture. The composition of the wall ensembles invited viewers to look for visual connections across objects rather than study each piece individually. Diverging from contemporary exhibition trends, Barnes did not group objects by artist, culture, or historical period. Instead he mixed and matched, disconnecting the items on display from any context other than his galleries. Throughout his lifetime, Barnes reconfigured the wall ensembles to draw out new connections across objects.

Many of the education and exhibition practices at the Barnes Foundation reflected Barnes’s desire to change Philadelphia’s cultural landscape by providing a new model for experiencing art. He asserted that his institution offered a necessary alternative to the region’s art establishment, which he repeatedly criticized for its conservative tastes, elitism, and frivolity. His work, too, was the subject of frequent critique. For example, paintings from his collection met with mockery when exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1923.

Even so, the impressive collection eventually attracted extensive positive attention from scholars, art collectors, and other individuals not affiliated with the foundation. Members of the public who wanted to visit the collection were required to write to the foundation and request an appointment. Although Barnes welcomed many outsiders into his galleries, he notoriously denied access to several prominent individuals including author James A. Michener (1907-97), collector Walter P. Chrysler (1909-88), and art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-96). Illustrative of Barnes’s strong personality and sharp tongue, some who were refused admission to the collection received rejection letters signed by Barnes’s francophone dog. Critics accused Barnes of leveraging his galleries as a tool for spurning people he did not like or whose elite social status he resented. Barnes maintained that for the sake of the school he only permitted visitors who were interested in the serious study of art.

When Barnes died unexpectedly in a car accident on July 24, 1951, the guidelines he developed for the foundation’s long-term operations took effect. As outlined in the foundation’s bylaws, these instructions ranged from a proscription against moving the paintings after he and his wife died to a plan for transferring leadership. Initially, his wife Laura (1875-1966), director of the foundation’s arboretum since 1928, became president. Education programs continued under the direction of Violette de Mazia (1896-1988), Barnes’s longtime assistant who had played a vital role in developing much of the curriculum. After Laura Barnes died, trustee Nelle E. Mullen (1883-1967) assumed the leadership position. Following her death, stewardship of the foundation began to shift from the original trustees to Lincoln University, a historically Black university in nearby Chester County, which became responsible for appointing new trustees to the foundation’s board as positions opened.

With the exception of occasional lawsuits and financial challenges, the foundation operated quietly for four decades after Barnes’s death. It reemerged in the public eye in 1990, when newly appointed director Richard Glanton (b. 1946) initiated a series of changes aimed at improving the foundation’s fiscal viability and public image. Although the bylaws provided specifications for how the foundation should function when Barnes could no longer lead the organization, they provided limited options for raising the revenue required to maintain the foundation’s activities. By 1990 the galleries required substantial renovations and the foundation did not have sufficient funds to cover the cost of the project. To raise money for the endeavor, the foundation obtained permission from the Montgomery County Orphans’ Court to send selected works from the collection on an international tour while the galleries closed for renovations. Judge Louis Stefan (1925-94) determined that a one-time deviation from the prohibition against moving the paintings would be permissible in order to ensure the foundation’s future success. Between 1993 and 1995 an exhibition of European masterworks from the collection traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich, earning unprecedented attention for the collection and, in several cases, for the institutions that hosted the tour, as well.

When the collection returned from the tour and the galleries reopened in Merion in November 1995, the foundation faced new challenges. More visitors than ever flocked to see the now-famous art. Although a local ordinance limited the number of weekly visitors the foundation could host, the newfound attention created problems in the neighborhood. It brought an abundance of tourists onto a residential street, and the traffic upset neighbors. The foundation tried to ameliorate the situation by building a parking lot to accommodate the cars and tour buses, but neighbors protested this action, as well. Conflict over the increased traffic resulted in an expensive lawsuit that left the foundation unable to pay its legal bills and maintain operations under its financial model. Recognizing the hostile local context and financial challenges that it faced, foundation leaders explored the possibility of moving the galleries from Merion to Center City Philadelphia, where, they argued, the institution could better accommodate visitors and fundraise more effectively. At the same time, the foundation also sought court permission to expand its board from five members to fifteen members in order to broaden its adviser base and enhance its ability to raise funds and fulfill its mission.

Major Philadelphia philanthropists and political leaders backed these endeavors. Critics, including arts writers and Barnes alumni, vehemently protested against relocating the collection. They argued that it belonged in Merion because Cret’s galleries, the arboretum setting, and the historical context in which it had been displayed for decades were vital to the full experience of the collection. Others challenged the proposed board expansion, arguing that such an act would shift control of the foundation into the hands of powerful individuals and organizations that Barnes had vied with during his lifetime. The foundation’s lawyers argued that moving the collection and expanding the board was the only way that it could maintain operations. Although Judge Stanley R. Ott granted permission for these changes in 2004, the foundation was enmeshed in legal battles and waves of conflicting public opinion for nearly another decade as a group of neighbors and former students led repeated challenges to the judge’s ruling both within and beyond the courts. During that period the Barnes Foundation became an important case study for scholars and practitioners in a range of fields including philanthropy, nonprofit management, museum studies, and trust and estate law.

Despite the efforts of those who opposed the move, the Barnes Foundation expanded onto a new campus on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, which opened to the public in 2012. At that time the Merion campus became dedicated primarily to horticultural programs. The 4.5-acre Philadelphia campus is located in a tourist district near the Franklin Institute, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. With a building by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and landscape design by Olin, it speaks the language of public institution, not domestic enclave. In addition to its permanent collection galleries, which resemble the historic Merion setting and preserved Barnes’s wall ensembles, the Parkway facilities include special exhibition galleries and visitor services beyond what was feasible in Merion. The foundation expanded its education programs to offer lessons for school groups in partnership with the School District of Philadelphia, and it provides both traditional and new courses for adult learners. The move cemented the foundation’s shift from primarily serving its regular students to directing its efforts toward a broad cross-section of the public. In turn, city leaders touted the Barnes on the Parkway as an important contribution to Philadelphia’s rich constellation of cultural offerings that elevate the city’s status in the eyes of national and international audiences.

Laura Holzman is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the majority of public libraries were subscription libraries, which required membership fees to gain library privileges. This led to only wealthier members of society having access to books. Carnegie, who had little formal education and could not afford the fee for a subscription library, gained access to books for self-study and developed a love for literature because a local philanthropist in Pittsburgh opened his library to young working men. Carnegie agreed with the prominent belief of the time period: that reading good books would lead to good behavior and that public libraries would contribute to progress and social order. This belief, his own learning through reading, and his conviction that no man should have excess wealth, led him to create a program through which communities could request funds for libraries. Eventually 1,689 of these libraries, referred to as Carnegie Libraries, were founded throughout the United States and other English-speaking countries.

The program began in 1886, when Carnegie donated funds for a library building and community center to Allegheny, near Pittsburgh. Towns and cities applying for a library grant were required to demonstrate the need for a library, provide a building site, and promise to provide ongoing support for books, upkeep, and staff with taxes equal to no less than 10 percent of the library grant. While some criticized Carnegie for not providing endowments or books to the libraries, this ensured that the community supported the library and fostered a sense of ownership and responsibility.

In 1903, the librarian of the Free Library of Philadelphia applied to Carnegie for funding to create thirty branch libraries with an estimated cost of $20,000 to $30,000 for each branch. The Free Library had opened in 1894, and by 1898 the library system had 160 employees, fourteen branches, and 250,000 volumes. However, none of the system’s libraries had a purpose-built library building, and many operated in poor conditions without enough space.

Carnegie agreed to provide $50,000 for each of the Free Library’s branches, more than requested, based on his experience funding branch libraries in Pittsburgh and New York City. In 1904, the City Council accepted Carnegie’s offer, but only twenty-five libraries were built, due to rising costs of building construction over the decades it took to erect the branches. Each branch was designed to be suitable to each neighborhood in outward appearance, and under the direction of Carnegie’s secretary James Bertram (1872-1934) the branch libraries in Philadelphia had a significant impact on the layout of other Carnegie library buildings. Many were T-shaped with an open plan, contained flexible spaces for public lectures or events, and had open stacks that allowed patrons to browse books, which was uncommon in the early twentieth century.

Although the Midwest received the largest portion of libraries funded by Carnegie, the program funded fifty-nine library buildings in Pennsylvania and thirty-six in New Jersey (Delaware is one of two states that received no funding). In Philadelphia and the surrounding region, many agreed with Carnegie’s belief that libraries would allow for self-improvement, but others complained about the struggle to find an appropriate building sites or the ongoing costs related to the libraries. Others complained about lack of specific genres, such as a nine-year-old girl from New Jersey who wanted more fairy tales.

Many of the libraries funded by Carnegie in the Philadelphia region continued to operate in the twenty-first century, including fifteen of the original Free Library of Philadelphia branch locations. Some — notably the Camden Free Public Library built in 1905 — deteriorated to ruin, while others found new uses. In Philadelphia, the Germantown branch became a senior citizens center, and the Manayunk building became a nursing home.

Carnegie Libraries greatly impacted the Philadelphia region by providing the much-needed funding for library buildings, which allowed for the creation of new library systems as well as the expansion of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Cassie Brand is Curator of Rare Books at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the history of the book as a physical and cultural object, collecting history, and library history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Like public schools, charters were tuition free and (theoretically) open to all students. However, they were exempted from most government regulations and had to compete with traditional public schools and other charters for students. Theories of choice and competition were central to the charter school movement. Many proponents argued that the public school “monopoly” was bad for students and that charter schools, by infusing market dynamics into the educational domain, promoted more innovative and responsive schools.

In 1991 Minnesota was the first state in the country to pass a law authorizing charters. New Jersey and Delaware passed charter school bills in 1995, and Pennsylvania followed suit in 1997. As in other areas, charter schools in the region were generally a response to urban school failure and were uncommon in suburban and rural areas. Indeed, over half of all the state’s charters were in Philadelphia as the school year began in the fall of 2016, while only five were in the suburban school districts in the four Pennsylvania counties surrounding it. Similar patterns appeared in Chester and Camden.

Charter schools immediately generated controversy, with proponents claiming that they provided important options to students trapped in failing schools and critics maintaining they took resources and students away from public school districts and increased race and class segregation. Republican lawmakers (especially at the state level) championed charter schools, viewing them as a way to counter the power of teachers unions, but even some Democrats also supported them.  For example, Pennsylvania State Representative Dwight Evans (b. 1954) saw charter schools as a way to increase school choice for his African American constituents in Philadelphia.

Charter Schools in Philadelphia

The first charter schools in Philadelphia opened in 1997. The number of charters rose from a handful at first to eighty-four by the fall of 2016, serving approximately 30 percent of the students in Philadelphia. Philadelphia had one of the highest proportions of students in charters in the country, behind only New Orleans, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Cleveland. Theoretically, charter schools were accountable to the authorizing district, which had the right to close the schools if they did not live up to the terms of their charters. However, Pennsylvania’s charter school law included limited mechanisms for oversight and accountability, and only a handful of charters were closed due to poor student performance or financial mismanagement.

Charter schools in Philadelphia varied widely in mission and program. Some focused on particular cultural heritages, others on workforce development or at-risk populations; still others aimed to provide highly academic, college preparatory experiences. Charters also played a central role in School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s  (1947-2013) reform effort, launched in 2010. Called the “Renaissance Schools Initiative,” the strategy aimed at quickly improving outcomes in some of the city’s lowest-performing schools. As a part of this initiative, seven traditional public schools in the city with especially poor outcomes were turned over to charter providers (with more to come in the following years). Selected providers included Mastery Charter, which ran a network of “no excuses” schools with high expectations for low-income students.

Like charters across the country, some Philadelphia charters produced better student achievement outcomes than traditional public schools, some produced the same, and some produced worse. Such high levels of variation made it difficult to draw absolute conclusions about relative student performance, but, in general, charter schools in the district did not outperform their traditional counterparts. Despite their mixed results, charter schools were popular; parents appreciated having the freedom to choose, and charters were often seen as safer. Scandals involving mismanagement and even fraud did little to discredit them.

Charter Schools and the Funding Crisis

Funding for charter schools in Pennsylvania came from the students’ original districts, with the amount determined by a state formula that distinguished between regular education and special education students. This formula was especially problematic for the School District of Philadelphia given its already low per-pupil spending, inadequate financial support from the state, and large numbers of English Language Learners and special education students who needed additional services. For each student, the district was required to send approximately 70 percent of that year’s per-pupil cost from the district to the receiving charter; each special education student in a charter cost the district significantly more (nearly 180 percent of the per-pupil cost). This plan was designed to leave the sending district some money for fixed expenses, while directing the bulk of each student’s funding to the school he or she would attend. The result, however, was a significant drain on the district’s budget, especially because charter schools served fewer English Language Learners and high-needs special education students, which left district-run schools responsible for educating a costlier population. A state subsidy intended to help districts offset some of the costs of charter schools was eliminated in 2011, further exacerbating the district’s funding problems.

By 2012, the shift of students and funds to charters forced the district to close dozens of schools, generally those with declining student populations located in high-poverty areas. Some parents and politicians blamed charters for these austerity measures. Critics also argued that the district moved many students from closing schools to those with worse achievement records and that its decision to shutter schools discounted local traditions, undermined social bonds, and left certain neighborhoods bereft of functional institutions.

Other Regional Charter Schools

The School District of Philadelphia was not the only school district in southeastern Pennsylvania affected by the rise of charters. Half of the students in the Chester-Upland School District attended them. Most were enrolled in Chester Community Charter School (CCCS), the largest in the state. CCCS was a for-profit school that attracted attention not only for the close ties between its founder, Gladwyne attorney Vahan H. Gureghian (b. 1955), and major Republican figures in the state but also for questionable financial dealings, including extravagant charges for special education.

In addition, Pennsylvania law allowed for cyber charters (schools in which most or all of the instruction occurred online), which were authorized at the state level and served thirty-five thousand students in 2015. Although cyber charters were not subject to oversight by school districts and students could attend any cyber charter in the state, cyber charters received the same per-pupil funding from the student’s home district as regular charters. Cyber charters were controversial because they operated with minimal oversight and produced generally poor outcomes.

One of the first charters in New Jersey, LEAP Academy, opened in Camden City in 1997. Operated in partnership with Rutgers University-Camden, LEAP originally served students in K-6th grades and later expanded into a K-12 school. Other charter schools followed in New Jersey, mainly in impoverished cities like Camden, where performance was low. By 2012, there were twelve such schools in Camden, the second-largest number for any city in the state. They served about 3,700 students; Camden’s public schools, on the other hand, enrolled 13,000.

With Camden school performance continuing to lag, the New Jersey legislature—prompted by State Senator Donald Norcross (b. 1958) and with the influential backing of his brother, South Jersey power broker George Norcross (b. 1957)—passed Renaissance school legislation, loosely modeled on the program by the same name adopted in Philadelphia in 2010. Providing both incentives to private investors, such as higher per-pupil subsidies than standard charters received, and greater flexibility in contracting for services, the program also aimed at strengthening neighborhoods by requiring that students live in local catchment areas designated by the school district.

Both traditional charters and Renaissance schools found strong supporters among community advocates. Academic outcomes, however, were mixed. A 2007 report by the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers University, the first of its kind, determined that on fourth-grade standardized tests for language and math, New Jersey’s charter schools performed worse on average than other public schools in the same district, although it also found that over time schools that survived review tended to show better results. In 2012 the Center for Research in Education Outcomes at Stanford University provided more encouraging statistics in both reading and mathematics for 2006 to 2011. Although critics expressed concern at the effect Renaissance schools in particular might have in draining students from traditional public schools, with the three Renaissance operators authorized to educate over nine thousand youth, the political weight behind the movement was strong and accelerating.

Like New Jersey, Delaware passed its charter school law in 1995. By 2016 there were twenty-two charter schools operating in New Castle County, only thirteen of which were in Wilmington. Buchanan v. Evans (1975), which combined parts of Wilmington with nearby suburbs to consolidate schools in New Castle County, may account for the existence of so many charter schools in the Wilmington suburbs.

Beginning in the 1990s, charter schools helped reshape education in many parts of the Philadelphia metropolitan area. As the number of charters increased, it became more and more common for students to spend at least some of their school years in a charter.  Although they were largely intended to improve opportunities and outcomes for students who had been poorly served by traditional public schools, research on charter school outcomes was mixed. Nevertheless, charters continued to be politically popular and to attract large numbers of families seeking options they felt were safer and more personalized than district-run schools. Over the course of several decades, the rise of charter schools meant that in most urban areas of the Philadelphia region “school choice” had moved from slogan to reality.

Maia Cucchiara is an Associate Professor of Urban Education at Temple University. She is the author of Marketing Schools, Marketing Cities: Who Wins and Who Loses When Schools Become Urban Amenities (University of Chicago Press, 2013). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Central to the mission of the Commercial Museum was the notion that commerce was the unifying principle of mankind: past, present, and future. The 1890s marked a period of global transformation, during which the industrial economy of the United States continued to expand. In response to the manufacturing boom, American manufacturers began to seek foreign markets to sell their products. They also exhibited their wares at the world’s fairs that characterized the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of those fairs, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, had a role in the creation of Philadelphia’s Commercial Museum. Among the many American traders and manufacturers enticed and inspired by the Chicago fair was a former botanist and University of Pennsylvania professor, William P. Wilson (1844-1927). After visiting the Columbian Exposition, Wilson officially founded the Commercial Museum the same year, housing the collections in a variety of temporary locations until the building was officially completed in 1897. Borrowing the neoclassical style of the Columbian Exposition, the Commercial Museum communicated legitimacy through the architectural style of empire, rationality, and intelligence. The Commercial Museum acquired many items from the Columbian Exposition and eventually became the official repository for artifacts from many of the world’s fairs of the era.

The Commercial Museum aimed to educate everyone about the merits of international trade. Schoolchildren from across the region came to learn about the pivotal role of commerce throughout history and to explore strange artifacts from faraway lands. Merchants came from around the globe to educate themselves about foreign markets and production methods by examining raw and manufactured goods held in the collections. The Commercial Museum also administered a Bureau of Information, which compiled and published international trade and market reports to aid American entrepreneurs as they expanded their enterprises at home and abroad. Inspired by the idea of a commercial museum, American and foreign business leaders in California, France, Berlin, China, and more developed similar museums and hosted world’s fair-style expositions in order to develop transnational trade relations.  The museum reigned as the foremost authority on information regarding manufacturing and international commerce in the United States for a quarter century.

The Commercial Museum’s prominence as a beacon of commercial knowledge and exhibits began to wane by the 1920s. A variety of social, political, and economic factors rendered it increasingly irrelevant, the most significant of which was the rise of the International Trade Commission. Developed by the United States Department of Commerce in 1916, the International Trade Commission was closely modeled after the Commercial Museum’s Bureau of Information. Until then the museum acted as the unchallenged provider of international trade intelligence, market reports, and commercial knowledge. The Trade Commission, among other newly formed transnational trade institutions, began to assume this role by publishing international trade and market reports.

By the 1950s the museum had become obsolete. After decades of decreased public interest and visitation, in 1952 the City of Philadelphia restored and attempted to revitalize the Commercial Museum and neighboring Convention Hall. The museum was rebranded as a part of the Philadelphia Civic Center, but its staff was drastically reduced. Thereafter known as the Civic Center Museum, it continued to provide educational programming and display exhibits until 1994, when it closed indefinitely.

In 2001 the City of Philadelphia, through the Orphans’ Court, dispersed the majority of the Commercial Museum’s holdings to universities, museums, and archives around the city. Among these, Temple University’s Anthropology Lab, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Independence Seaport Museum, and the Philadelphia History Museum gained significant collections. The Civic Center and museum building complex were razed in 2005 and became the site for the University of Pennsylvania’s Ruth and Raymond Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine. The Pennsylvania Convention Center, located at Eleventh and Arch Streets, became Philadelphia’s center for commerce and trade, acting as a venue for international trade shows and other events.

Grace Schultz earned an M.A. in History with a concentration in public history from Temple University and is an Archives Technician at the National Archives at Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Founded in 1901, Joliet Junior College in Illinois was the first two-year, public college serving a local community. It had more than eighty public and private counterparts across the country within two decades, most often in states with strong systems of public higher education. None were in the Greater Philadelphia area. The number skyrocketed over the next twenty years, however, reaching 456 by 1940 with combined enrollment approaching 150,000 students. About 18 percent of the nation’s undergraduates at that time studied in two-year institutions, almost two-thirds of them in public junior colleges. Despite such impressive growth, however, the two-year college struggled to carve out a distinctive place for itself in the American educational system. Was it an extension of high school, an introduction to college, or something else?  Should its students expect to pass directly into the workplace upon graduation or continue their formal education?

In the 1930s most two-year colleges in the United States had no home of their own; public school districts provided them instructional and administrative space. In 1932 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recommended that the two-year college be recognized as the capstone of public education. But because the high school was well on its way to becoming a mass institution by then, some educators and policy makers thought that two-year, public institutions of post-secondary education deserved to have their own place in the American educational system. A special commission established by President Harry Truman (1884-1972) in 1946 endorsed this idea. Proposing that they be called community rather than junior colleges, the commission argued that they could help fight the Cold War by bringing higher education to a wide audience at the local level. But what should such institutions teach? Some favored general education for all, but most adopted a diversified curriculum for academic and social sorting and tracking.

1960s: The Rise of Community Colleges

There were almost no community colleges in Delaware, Pennsylvania, or New Jersey prior to 1960. A federal agency, the Emergency Relief Administration, funded six junior colleges in the Garden State in the 1930s, but just two remained after the agency terminated. Only a catastrophe like the Great Depression had justified any federal aid at all because most Americans thought education was a state and local obligation. A generation later these three states had many community colleges, including eight in the Greater Philadelphia area. Higher education was expanding thanks to the GI Bill, the Baby Boom, and the democratization of secondary education. The Community College of Philadelphia and Bucks County Community College opened in 1965; Montgomery County Community College in 1966; Camden County College, Gloucester County College, Delaware County Community College, and the Delaware Institute of Technology (soon renamed Delaware Technical Community College) in 1967; and Burlington County College in 1969.

State government helped these schools get established, but its ongoing role differed in each state. Enacted by the New Jersey legislature in 1962, the County College Act authorized the creation of public community colleges and set up procedures for launching them. It also committed the state to funding them, at least in part. Pennsylvania took a similar step one year later. The Pennsylvania Community College Act permitted local authorities to establish two-year colleges and called for developing master plans to coordinate their design and development. Adopted by the Delaware General Assembly in 1966, House Bill 529 authorized a statewide technical community college offering career, remedial, general, and transfer education. Congress undoubtedly gave all three states added incentive by adopting legislation in 1963 to fund construction of college facilities and, two years later, scholarships and loans to college students. Doing so did not preempt state control of higher education. Consequently, the management schemes worked out for community colleges in these three states reflected their different political cultures.

Small in population and in area, Delaware had a history by the 1960s of centralized educational decision-making. More than forty years before reformers had convinced the legislature to adopt a new public school code that greatly reduced the power of local authorities. The philanthropist Pierre Samuel du Pont (1870-1954) reinforced such thinking by giving more than $5 million to modernize the state’s public school buildings. The legislature’s decision to have one community college for the entire state followed from this history. The college might facilitate attendance and even tailor some programs to local audiences by having multiple campuses. Between 1967 and 1974 it opened four in Georgetown (1967), Dover (1972), Stanton (1973), and Wilmington (1974). But each campus was part of the same centrally managed institution.

Pennsylvania Rivalries and Local Control

In Pennsylvania regional rivalries and a strong tradition of local control delayed the adoption of a master plan for higher education until 1967. By then, the Commonwealth had  fourteen community colleges, including four in the five-county Philadelphia area. Each had its own board of directors, and each reported to a local sponsor: a city (Community College of Philadelphia), a county (Montgomery County CC and Bucks County CC), or local school districts (Delaware County CC). Charged with implementing the Pennsylvania Community College Act, the newly created Council of Higher Education wanted to open more two-year colleges in the state, especially in areas it deemed underserved by public higher education. But there was some hesitation in Harrisburg because by 1960 Pennsylvania State University had fourteen two-year branch campuses, offering both terminal and transfer programs. It added five more between 1965 and 1967, one of which was in Delaware County. Other Pennsylvania universities such as Temple, Clarion, and the University of Pittsburgh had similar operations or aspirations. When Montgomery County CC offered to buy Temple’s suburban campus in Ambler, Temple said no, even though it had just sold the Stanley Elkins Tyler estate in Newtown to Bucks County CC. Already the site of the university’s horticulture program, the Ambler Campus was to be Temple’s portal in the suburbs after the university’s becoming state-related in 1965 put it on track for major expansion.

New Jersey’s approach to the oversight of community colleges vacillated between local control and centralized management. Adopted in 1967, the New Jersey Higher Education Act created a centralized administrative structure for overseeing and coordinating a state system of higher education. A new State Board of Higher Education and a Department of Higher Education now took responsibility for county college development; by 1982 they had helped raise the number of such schools from four to nineteen. But each school had its own board of trustees, most of whose members were appointed at the county level. Trenton never provided adequate funding, forcing these colleges to rely primarily on local property taxes and student tuition. They took more responsibility for themselves when the New Jersey Higher Education Restructuring Act (1994) abolished the State Board of Higher Education in a Republican move to reduce government regulation. Authorized by the state legislature in 1989, the New Jersey Council of County Colleges became the means by which these schools submitted a collective budget request to the state. In 2003 Governor James E. McGreevy (b. 1957) created by executive order the New Jersey Community College Compact, a partnership between the state and its county colleges. The compact’s primary goal was to strengthen training for workforce development, but it also sought to improve the protocols governing the transfer of county college students to four-year colleges and universities in New Jersey.

The community colleges in Greater Philadelphia grew rapidly at first. Enrollment at the Community College of Philadelphia reached 4,365 students in 1967, just its second year of operation. At Delaware County CC it popped by over 400 percent between 1967 and 1969. Bucks County CC went from 731 students in its first year to 5,607 in its seventh.  In South Jersey the numbers were equally impressive.

Decades of Growth

Powered by an open-door admissions policy, the region’s community colleges continued to grow for the rest of the century. The Community College of Philadelphia became enormous, educating between 35,000 and 45,000 students annually. In its golden anniversary year (2007), Camden County College reported its enrollment to be more than thirty thousand, not counting remedial students. Enrollment also surged at the rest, bringing thousands of nontraditional students to campuses where they mingled with six to nine thousand degree and certificate candidates (matriculants). In 2016 the Community College Review reported that Montgomery County CC had 12,805 matriculants. According to the same source, the number of such students at the Community College of Philadelphia had reached 19,119, but Camden County College’s number had fallen from 14,471 to 12,051 since 2007. Full-timers now amounted to more than half the matriculants at only two of the eight schools in the region (Gloucester and Camden), reflecting a trend in undergraduate education that saw the time-to-degree ratio increase as more students, including many working adults, pursued higher education.

The campus facilities of the community colleges in Greater Philadelphia changed dramatically over the years, helping each of these schools develop their own brand and image. The Community College of Philadelphia conducted its first classes in a repurposed department store near City Hall. In 1973 it began migrating to its next location at Seventeenth and Spring Garden streets, an impressive neo-classical building that once had been the Philadelphia Mint, a move not completed for a decade. The community colleges in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties began their work in public schools but soon moved to their own facilities. Over time, every community college in the region erected buildings, often on large properties, and opened branch campuses. Purchased in 1967 from the Mother of Savior Seminary, Camden County College’s original campus in Blackwood came with 320 acres. In Camden city, it did not have a building of its own for twenty-two years. Partnering with Cherry Hill Township and the William G. Rohrer Foundation, it added a multipurpose campus on Route 70 and Springdale Road in 2000. Serving Delaware and Chester Counties, Delaware County CC eventually had six locations including one in Chester County Hospital.

The curriculum was never static at any of the region’s community colleges. As transfer institutions, they offered general education courses that could count toward bachelor’s degrees earned elsewhere. As adult institutions, they taught both credit and noncredit classes for academic advancement, professional development, or personal enrichment. As vocational institutions, they provided technical training that could lead to immediate employment. Their vocational programs responded to modifications in the local economy. Medical coding, information technology, hotel management, and culinary arts became popular choices as Greater Philadelphia left behind its industrial past for a future built on health care, communications, hospitality, education, and public administration. These applied curricula attracted many students, but even more popular were those for students aiming to transfer to four-year colleges or universities, including those not yet ready for college-level work. In 1973 the Office of Institutional Research at Bucks County CC did a comprehensive study of its recent graduates. It learned that the majority were still students one year after graduation and so was a plurality of all its graduates. Most had remained in the region, matriculating at Penn State, Temple, Trenton State (renamed the College of New Jersey in 1996), and West Chester. This pattern became more pronounced as the region’s four-year colleges and universities increased their tuition year after year. Looking for a cheaper alternative, many families decided to send their children to the local community college for their first two years. This helps to explain why the Office of Institutional Research at the Community College of Philadelphia found in 2013 that about 60 percent of its recent graduates had gone on to a baccalaureate program within five years.

Credit Transfer Not So Seamless

In theory, transferring from a community college to a four-year institution was seamless. Applicants for advanced standing at a four-year college or university expected to carry all their community college credits with them. But receiving schools did not always award full credit, leaving some transfer students with a deficit. Inter-institutional agreements to facilitate transfer were not new in the 1980s, especially in states with large, public higher education systems. Such agreements became increasingly important in the Philadelphia region, especially as undergraduate enrollments started to decline in the 1970s. To keep transfer students from going out of state, four-year colleges and universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania adopted what came to be known as “articulation” agreements, often after lengthy negotiations with local and state authorities. In 1973 New Jersey adopted what it called the Full-Faith-and-Credit policy that promised a smooth transition between its county and state colleges. Graduates of approved transfer programs at county colleges were guaranteed admission to a state college with 68 credits, but in practice fewer than half had all their county college credits accepted. A state Higher Education Plan adopted in 1981 urged Rutgers, the state university, to implement the policy, but only its Camden and Newark campuses complied. The campus in New Brunswick demurred. By contrast, Temple signed separate articulation agreements with Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware County CCs in 1998. In 2006 Pennsylvania required its fourteen state universities to admit graduates of the state’s community colleges and award them at least some transfer credit.

Transfer students almost always remained in the region. Rutgers-Camden was by the far the most popular transfer destination for students from the community colleges in Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties. Between 1984 and 1986, only ten chose to enroll at Rutgers in New Brunswick. Temple University was the most popular destination for students from the Community College of Philadelphia. For example, more than one third of all the students transferring to Temple between 1988 and 1998 came from there, 7,662 out of 22,248. Both Temple and the Community College of Philadelphia closely monitored their transfer students’ five-year graduation rate, which went from 42.6 percent in 1988 to 49.3 percent six years later.  But students from the Community College of Philadelphia never achieved a higher graduation rate than the university’s general population of transfer students.

In 2001 the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems concluded that Pennsylvania still had not developed “an effective system for providing community college services” across the state. It urged the existing schools to strengthen their capacities in workforce development and educational access. In response, some community colleges streamlined the transfer process by adopting dual admissions agreements. Over the next decade Montgomery County CC and Bucks County CC partnered with four state universities in Pennsylvania: Montgomery County CC with Cheyney (2005), Kutztown (2007), and West Chester (2009) and both Montgomery and Bucks County CCs with East Stroudsburg (2016). Montgomery County CC even reached such an agreement with Dickinson College, a selective, private institution more than one hundred miles from its main campus. In South Jersey both Gloucester and Burlington County College partnered with nearby Rowan University, leading both county colleges to change their name. Gloucester became Rowan College at Gloucester County in 2014 and Burlington became Rowan College at Burlington County the following year.  By then the latter had guaranteed admissions agreements with more than thirty public and private colleges and universities.

Race and Economics

From their inception the community colleges in Greater Philadelphia enrolled far more white than Black students. The Community College of Philadelphia was the lone exception. By the turn of the millennium, after all, the city’s population was 44 percent African American.  Philadelphia also had many champions of Black education. Led by Maurice B. Fagan (1910-92), the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission was one of the most important. Along with the NAACP, it urged city and state officials to establish a community college that would open the door to higher education for the city’s African Americans. From the beginning the Community College of Philadelphia attracted many Black students. In 1967 they comprised 23 percent of its student body. Fifty years later they were 40 percent.

Economic circumstances were also an important variable in the student demographics of the community colleges in the region. Their comparatively low tuition and work-friendly programs appealed to those with busy schedules and limited incomes. Such students often could not attend full time; the demands on their personal time and the opportunity costs of such attendance were too great. Many had spotty academic records. While these schools never enrolled only students from the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum, such students increasingly predominated. Their alumni’s average annual earnings corroborate this generalization. In 2016 it did not exceed $40,000 for any of them. The suburban schools approached that number ($39,300 at Bucks and $39,200 at Montgomery), but the rest fell well below it, some by several thousand dollars ($32,800 at Delaware Technical Community College and $34,900 at the CC of Philadelphia).

When the community colleges in Greater Philadelphia appeared in the 1960s, there was no consensus about whether they were needed.  It was not at all clear where they fit into the region’s educational system. Such uncertainty came from a lack of consensus about their status and mission. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the region’s community colleges had become an integral part of its educational system. They compensated for the limitations and failures of public education by providing trade training and remedial education. They broadened access to higher education by being a low-cost, local alternative for beginning college students. They contributed to economic growth and local pride by building modern facilities and operating multiples campuses. The complexity of this mission defied totally successful implementation, but it justified their repute as an educational staple in the region.

William W. Cutler III is Emeritus Professor of History at Temple University and the associate editor for education for The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the earliest Christian communities, some women devoted their lives to emulating Jesus Christ. Most of these women were virgins who saw themselves as “brides of Christ,” and they wore veils as a symbol of that marriage. As they assembled in communities with their common cause, the “sisters” formed “convents,” from the Latin conventus, meaning gathering or coming together. Although convents have generally been associated with Roman Catholicism, Episcopal and orthodox communities also established convents in America. In the Philadelphia area, however, Roman Catholic convents predominated.

English settlement in the New World yielded a predominantly Protestant East Coast. The Quakers, who predominated under William Penn’s (1644-1718) initial settlement, allowed Catholics to worship privately without government interference, but the further influx of Catholic immigrants coupled with Protestant revivalism in the early nineteenth century generated a violent anti-Catholicism. Catholic immigrants needed Catholic leadership, education, and help in all forms. The Diocese of Philadelphia, founded in 1808, developed a number of Catholic schools by midcentury, but lay people staffed most of them. Within twenty-five years, religious communities of women formed to meet the educational and social needs of the growing Catholic population. These included the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sisters of St. Joseph, the Glen Riddle Sisters of St. Francis, and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Due to ethnic and religious discrimination of the Irish in Philadelphia, five Irish women established the first convent in Philadelphia in 1833. A Philadelphia priest met Mary Frances Clarke (1803-87) and her four companions in Dublin and convinced them to join him in Philadelphia to set up a school. Two months after arriving in the city, the women founded the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM Sisters) with the blessings of the Catholic Church. The sisters began to teach young children in a “free school” and took in sewing to supplement their income. As time passed, some of the Philadelphia sisters moved west to help teach Native Americans in Iowa. In May 1844, during a series of riots (Philadelphia Nativist Riots, also known as Philadelphia Prayer Riots, Bible Riots, and Native American Riots) resulting from anti-Catholic sentiment due to growing Irish Catholic population, anti-Catholic Nativists burned down the Philadelphia convent—Sacred Heart Academy (occupied by three sisters)— and St. Michael’s Church. Most of the BVM sisters had already left Philadelphia to minister to other regions.

Needing help in meeting the many and growing social and educational needs of Catholics in the diocese, Bishop Francis Kenrick (1797-1863) convinced a contingent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a religious order founded in LePuy, France, in 1650, to move to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s. The sisters began by administering St. John’s Orphanage for Boys in Philadelphia. In 1858, they purchased an established estate in Chestnut Hill, which became their administrative center and the first site of Mount Saint Joseph Academy. The sisters helped immigrants with educational needs, cared for orphans and widows, and worked as nurses during the American Civil War and the influenza epidemic of 1918.

The Diocese of Philadelphia was responsible for southern New Jersey (Archdiocese of New York held northern New Jersey) until 1853, when Pope Pius IX (1792-1878) established the Diocese of Newark, which initially covered all of New Jersey. Pius also established the Diocese of Wilmington in 1868. Up until this time, Philadelphia Catholic leaders treated New Jersey and Delaware as mission areas. The Sisters of St. Joseph administered two parochial schools in Delaware, but with the establishment of the new diocese, Bishop James Frederick Bryan Wood (1813-83) recalled them to Philadelphia.

In the mid-nineteenth century, following the death of her husband, Anna (Ana Maria Boll) Bachmann (1824-63) told her parish priest her desire to enter religious life. During his visit to Rome in 1854, Philadelphia’s Bishop John Neumann (1811-1860) informed Pope Pius IX about the need for sisters in his diocese. He also told the pope about Bachmann, her sister Barbara Boll, and a friend, Anna Dorn, all from Bavaria, and their desire to establish a religious community in Philadelphia. Bachmann (Sr. Mary Francis), Boll (Sr. Mary Margaret), and Dorn (Sr. Mary Bernardine) took their vows in May 1856 in Bishop Neumann’s private chapel. Two years later, “Mother” Francis officially founded the Institute of the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis. In 1871, the Philadelphia sisters took the opportunity to purchase the “Little Seminary” in Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, from Bishop Wood for $12,000. On the twenty-eight acres of land twenty-five miles southwest of Philadelphia, they made their home in old seminary buildings and founded a novitiate. The Motherhouse followed in 1896—Convent of Our Lady of Angels. In 1958, one hundred years after its founding, there were more than 1,600 Glen Riddle sisters working in grade schools and high schools, hospitals and centers of nursing, catechetical centers, and a seminary. By 2015, the congregation’s numbers had dropped to about 450 Catholic women Religious.

In 1858, the Sisters of St. Francis traveled to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, to welcome the Immaculate Heart of Mary Sisters to eastern Pennsylvania. The IHM sisters opened a mission in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1859 with a select school for girls and a parish school for boys and girls. Reading became the motherhouse for the IHM sisters in eastern Pennsylvania from 1864-1871. From there the sisters also established schools in Philadelphia. In 1872, Bishop Wood provided a new motherhouse and novitiate in West Chester. In October of that year, the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in West Chester held its first reception of seven novices. At the same time, the sisters opened a school in St. Agnes Parish (established 1793), West Chester.

Episcopal female communities established themselves in America as early as the Roman Catholic convents did, but there were considerably fewer of them. Although none developed directly in the Philadelphia area, the Community of St. John the Baptist Episcopal Sisters came to America in 1874 (founded in England 1852) and built a convent in New York three years later. Since 1900, they have continued an active ministry in Mendham, New Jersey. Orthodox women’s communities developed much later. The Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, centered in Englewood, New Jersey, founded its first Monastery for Nuns, the Convent of St. Thekla, in Glenville, Pennsylvania, where nuns have prayed for the salvation of the world and led a life of repentance. The convents varied in purpose and function—from active ministry to contemplative life—but the vocation of the women was to serve God.

Although most Roman Catholic convents in the Philadelphia area were active within the community, other sisters lived a cloistered life. In 1915, Mother Mary Michael (1862-1934) founded the Convent of Divine Love in Philadelphia. Archbishop Edmund Francis Prendergast (1843-1918) desired to have an adoration convent in his archdiocese. The “Pink Sisters” wore rose-colored garbs with a white veil. In addition to kneeling night and day (in shifts perpetually since 1915) before the Most Blessed Sacrament, sisters made altar bread and worked as clerks and seamstresses.

Although financial deficits moved the Catholic leadership to auction off three former convents in 2013, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, as of 2015, listed over fifty religious congregations of women (particularly along the Main Line), which included many missionary sisters and international congregations. Still, the aging population of Catholic women Religious caused concern for the Catholic Church. As of 2014, a study showed that there were more Catholic sisters in the United States over age 90 than under age 60. The history of Catholic sisters in the Philadelphia area proved significant, however, as early Catholic education led by sisters through the past two centuries helped the region to maintain a strong Catholic identity even into the twenty-first century. Through the decades, they continued their vocations in education, social services, parish ministry, aid to the poor, marginal, and oppressed, and missionary work and, and they remained on the front lines for the Catholic Church.

Brenda Gaydosh is an Assistant Professor of History at West Chester University. Her research focuses on varied aspects of the Catholic Church—from a biography about Nazi-era German Provost Bernhard Lichtenberg to how the Catholic Church has dealt with genocide. (Author information current at time of publication.)