PAST MADE PRESENT: CLAIRE BRISLIN '07 RESEARCHES HISTORIC WALNUT LANE BRIDGE

This summer, Claire Brislin '07 worked with Germantown's historic Cliveden House, participating in a 10-week student summer internship through the John B. Hurford '60 Humanities Center. The second year of the Center's new program has seen the doubling of opportunities open to students, now placing rising seniors in a dozen arts organizations in the Philadelphia area.

Originally built as a summer home for the wealthy Philadelphia judge Benjamin Chew, Cliveden remained in the Chew family from 1767 until 1972, at which point they donated the property to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Chew house served as the British stronghold during the Revolutionary War's Battle of Germantown, the only military battle ever to take place within the boundaries of Philadelphia.

The property's energetic new executive director David Young hopes to expand Cliveden's services beyond its traditional hosting of the Battle of Germantown reenactment each October. Young has re-envisioned Cliveden as a vibrant community space that both celebrates Revolutionary-era history while fostering new initiatives to help revitalize Germantown.“David's the kind of person who will park his car on the street so he can run into people on the way to work,” says Brislin. Since his move from the historic Johnson House down the street in February, Young has continued Cliveden's popular jazz festival program. He has also hosted a middle school writing workshop on the grounds along with public readings; a published collection of student writings is in the works.

Despite Cliveden's saturation with Revolutionary-era history, most of Brislin's work this summer has focused on the early 20th century, specifically the Walnut Lane Bridge. Completed in 1908, the bridge connects the Germantown and Roxborough sections of Philadelphia, drastically shortening what had before been a half-day journey between the two neighborhoods. The new bridge attracted engineers from all over the world, as its concrete span was unprecedented.

By reading journals and newspaper clippings from the era, Brislin has begun to piece together the bridge's history for its 100th anniversary celebration next year. Brislin notes that on Dec. 27, 1907, workers at the near-completed bridge were removing the wood fake work from the second arch. The timber had been soaking from a recent rainstorm, and the structure collapsed, killing one main, maiming two, and injuring another dozen. Brislin contrasts community and newspaper records of the event with the engineer's own journal: As only the bridge's temporary scaffolding saw damage, his account of the event completely ignores the deaths. Brislin explains,“After reading all the dramatic news reports on the December accident, I was curious to read what the engineers had to say about the collapse. I was surprised when in their report (written for the Transactions of the Society of Civil Engineers) they scarcely mentioned the accident and in fact shrugged it off as a minor oversight that fortunately didn't hinder the bridge in any way. What interested me was how it demonstrates the different levels of consciousness and value for human life, which I think was heavily influenced by a value gap between social classes at the time.”

Such anecdotes are rare finds, however, as letters and records of the people working on the bridge are incredibly difficult to uncover, starkly contrasting with the Cliveden property's immaculate preservation. On her first day at work, Claire sat for over four hours reading the diaries and journals of the Chew family, learning about everything from deaths and births to where and when seed packets were purchased!

This kind of historical research has provided Brislin with a welcome breather after a rigorous year of Junior Seminar with the English department.“You just don't do research for English in the same way as for history,” she notes.“I was really into history in high school,” Brislin continues; during her junior year, she and a classmate participated in the National History Day Competition.“We were first in our district, first in the state, but didn't make it past the first round of nationals. We did a performance piece entitled ‘The Barbary Wars: Reacting to a Crisis and Reforming Foreign Policy'.”

Brislin's day-to-day work has varied throughout her internship; some days she works in the Cliveden office, helping with administrative tasks and phoning historical sites to generate interest in the bridge project. She's also had lots of what she calls“field trips”—visits to research and educational institutions like the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Chestnut Hill and Germantown Historical Societies, and Fairmount Archives.

Brislin spent a great deal of time analyzing and cataloguing a rare collection of lantern slides, acquired by Cliveden through pure serendipity—and a bit of help from eBay. She explains,“David Young and his friend and neighbor Dan Allen decided to start a Web site for their neighborhood, Blue Bell Hill, that functioned as an online museum that preserved and celebrated local history. Dan Allen wrote a brief essay on the Walnut Lane Bridge, and a random man happened to run across it on the Web. He contacted David Young and told him that he had a collection of about 70 lantern slides that documented the construction of the bridge. He had apparently inherited them from a relative (grandmother? aunt?) who had been from the Blue Bell Hill area and he was currently trying to sell them on eBay.

Philadelphia's Bridge and Street Departments—more traditional sources—helped Brislin track down the bridge's original plans.“It was actually pretty easy,” she says,“Well, a bit of a marathon of phone calls at first, but once I got hold of the right person, I just made an appointment with the city's chief bridge engineer…he pulled all 37 drawings out of a drawer and gave me a table to go through them and directed a young intern to make any copies I wanted. I didn't even have to wear gloves or anything.” Brislin even convinced the Bridge Department to loan the original, hand-inked on linen plans to Cliveden for future exhibition.

After a summer's worth of work, Brislin even delivered a talk on the project to a consortium of Germantown historical groups when her supervisor could not attend.“I accompanied the educator and public programs coordinator, Anne Roller, to a Historic Germantown Preserved meeting and gave a brief presentation of the Walnut Lane Bridge Project. At this point I had already gathered a bit of information and had some pretty impressive photos to pass around. I wasn't really prepared and it was funny thinking of myself as being the resident ‘expert,' but the most important thing to get across was how this project was not about the bridge but the people, the community, who built the bridge. As David repeated to me over and over again all summer, ‘The bridge is incidental, history is about the people'.”

Although she has enjoyed the challenges of research, Brislin sees her future in education, an interest nurtured by the internship.“I've had a desire to teach for a long time,” she notes,“and it has always made me pay really close attention to how my teachers and professors approach education. Although I wasn't working directly with educational aspects of Cliveden, my experience there this summer gave me a different perspective on what it means to educate and how education can and should extend beyond the classroom and traditional methods of teaching. It was really interesting learning about some of the local home schooling groups that took advantage of the local historic sites as a way to educate their children.”

Brislin says that Cliveden's next step will be to hold a“History Night” to get community members interested who might have access to journals or photographs from the era. Cliveden wants to involve other historic sites in the anniversary celebration. Programs are also in the works to excite and educate area children about their local history. As Brislin says,“Who doesn't like to build a bridge out of macaroni in class?”

Cliveden is open for tours April through December, Thursday through Sunday from 12 noon to 4 p.m.

—James Weissinger '06