built in 1803 by James Matthews, a whipmaker of the firm of
McAllister and Matthews. In 1812 it was purchased by John Wistar, son of
Daniel Wistar, and a member of the countinghouse of his uncle, William
Wistar. Upon his uncle's death he conducted the business with his
brother Charles and became well known in mercantile circles and
prominent in the Society of Friends. A bronze statue of him in Quaker
garb has been erected in front of the house. Some years after his death
in 1862 the place passed under the control of the city for a park and
was occupied for a time by the Free Library. Since the erection of a
building near by for this latter purpose, it has housed the museum of
the Site and Relic Society, and contains much of interest to the student
of early Germantown.

Another house in the Colonial spirit erected shortly after the close of
the Revolution is Loudoun, at Germantown Avenue and Apsley Street,
Germantown, its grounds embracing the summit of Neglee's Hill. The house
is two and a half stories high with additions which have somewhat
altered its original appearance; it has a gambrel roof, hipped at one
end after the Mansard manner with excellent dormers on both the front
and end just mentioned. Its plastered rubble masonry walls are clothed
with clinging ivy. The architectural interest centers chiefly in the
fenestration and the pillared portico reminiscent of plantation mansions
farther south. This portico, with its simple pediment and wooden columns
surmounted by pleasingly unusual capitals of acanthus-leaf motive, was
added some thirty years after the house was erected. The great
twenty-four-paned ranging windows have heavy paneled shutters on the
first floor and blinds on the second. Tall, slender, engaged columns
supporting a nicely detailed entablature frame a typical Philadelphia
doorway, the paneled door itself being single with a handsome leaded
fanlight above.

Loudoun was built in 1801 by Thomas Armat as a countryseat for his son,
Thomas Wright Armat. The elder Armat originally settled in Loudoun
County, Virginia, and hence the name of the estate. Coming to
Philadelphia about the time of the Revolution, his family moved to
Germantown during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 and found it such a
pleasing place of residence that the building of Loudoun some years
later came as a natural consequence. It stands at the very outskirts of
Germantown, now the twenty-second ward of Philadelphia, where Germant