The Woodlands (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) - Hamilton Estate (1735-1840)

Hamilton Estate (1735-1840)

The Woodlands was originally purchased in 1735 as a 250-acre (1.0 km2) tract on the west bank of the Schuylkill River by the famous Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton. When he died in 1741, he willed his lands to his son, also named Andrew, who survived his father by only six years. He devised what became a 300 acres (1.2 km2) estate to his son, William Hamilton (1745–1813), who acquired it at the age of twenty-one. He built a Georgian-style mansion with a grand, two-storied portico overlooking the river above Gray's Ferry. Following a trip to England after the American Revolution, Hamilton doubled the size of the dwelling into a 16-room manor with kitchens and service rooms in a windowed ground floor. The rebuilt Woodlands mansion became one of the greatest domestic American architectural achievements of the 18th century, recognized as a leading example of English taste and presaging architectural trends in the following century.

Hamilton was an active botanist, and his estate and greenhouses grew to contain more than 10,000 different species of plants including the first specimens introduced into America of the Ginkgo biloba, Paper Mulberry, Sycamore Maple, Ailanthus, Caucasian Zelkova, and Lombardy Poplar as well as plants grown from seeds harvested during Lewis and Clark’s expeditions—especially the Osage Orange or Maclura pomifera. Hamilton also collected and exchanged numerous native plants with his friends and neighbors, the Bartram family of botanists from nearby Bartram's Garden.

At one time, the estate covered 600 acres (2.4 km2) and stretched from the Schuylkill River to what is now Market Street on the north and 42nd Street on the west and incorporated Hamilton Village.