250236 Fun in Philly

Philadelphia has more concentrated history than any other place I know .

I was in Philadelphia for school on a new computer system. The training was 12 weeks long and a long way from home. In the 11th week, I had a plane ticket for Joyce to come to Plilly, spend the weekend and then travel to Florida to visit her aunt Betty and her mother there.

Joyce arrived in Philadelphia, took a limo-service to a city named King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I had booked a room for a weekend at the hotel there.

It was delightful to have Joyce with me again. The next morning I rented a car and we headed for Philly. We went downtown to see the sights. We toured the original federal courthouse, saw the liberty bell, toured Betsy Ross’s home, then went to the very first suburb in Philadelphia, the oldest constantly lived on street in America. The houses were all 10 feet wide and built one against the other. The reason for this was because home taxes were based on how much street frontage they occupied. We toured one of the homes. People were not tall back then, so ceilings and doorways were low. I discovered that by bumping my head against the ceiling. The homes of that street were called trinity homes. They were all 3 stories high. The first occupying family lived on the first floor, As they grew older and became parents, the first family moved up to the second floor. Later as grandparents, they moved to the top floor as their children had their own families which moved into the first floor.

We became very hungry, so we went back downtown to a restaurant designed to cook and serve in the same way it was done over 100 years ago. The wait staff were all in costumes of those times. Our meal was delicious. We decided to go back to the hotel. I had a tourist map which I handed to Joyce and she directed while I drove the car. We were soon in a beaten down neighborhood that was not a safe place to be. We were carefully headed out of town when we hit a dead end. There was an expressway going through there. That must have been a very old map I acquired, one made before the expressway. After much angst we found our way back to the hotel.

The next day I planned to drive us south into Delaware, where we would see the original Dupont powder works and one of the Dupont mansions. Dupont made gunpowder, at the Brandywine river. The gunpowder was made in small stone like buildings. Three sides were built in a normal way, with the three sides locked together. The fourth side of the building stood alone, disconnected from the other sides. Making gunpowder is a volatile job. The buildings often exploded. That is why the fourth side of the building was detached. The fourth side would be blown out to the river and the workers would be blasted across the river with the back of the building.

After the grisly side of life for the gunpowder workers, he went up a hill to one of the Dupont mansions. For its time, there was only one thing better than this and that was the other Dupont mansions further south.

Our memorable and fun weekend ended. Joyce flew on down to Florida to visit where her aunt Betty and her mother were living. I finished my training and flew down to Florida visiting and having a good time.

Brother Bill