Frederick J. Kimball: Home Still Standing in Philadelphia

[nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org]

One of our former Train Dispatchers sent me this article on Frederick J. Kimball, which recently appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.  It seems that Kimball's home still stands in Philadelphia, but is up for demolition.

Do we have any Listers in Philadelphia who could take a photograph of it and post it to the list...?

Following the newspaper article, there is a Wikipedia article on Kimball. 

One wonders how the good Frederick, who seems to have come from rather ordinary beginnings, by his thirties ended up as a "partner" in the private banking house of E. W. Clark.  Wife's money, maybe...?  Too bad we know so little about old F.J.

-- abram burnett



>>

 
The Philadelphia Inquirer 
Fri, May. 19, 2006 

Changing Skyline | Historic house deserves better from university

By Inga Saffron
Inquirer Architecture Critic

Philadelphia is a grandmother's attic piled high with architectural relics:
Greek Revival country houses adorned with pediments and columns for wealthy
19th-century tobacco merchants. Victorian mansions constructed with rambling
staircases and storybook turrets for the city's emerging railroad tycoons.
Queen Anne cottages decked out with spindles and immense limestone
fireplaces for the bankers who financed the early industrialists.

It's an unfortunate fact that the city today has more stuff than its
shrunken population can ever use. The lucky buildings - mainly those
designed by notable architects or located in thriving neighborhoods - are
tended by appreciative owners, who treat them like hothouse plants. The
others can be seen in the city's dusty corners, tottering on their old legs,
sinking slowly into the earth. But the saddest cases by far are those that
have been arbitrarily designated for execution while their bones are still
sound.

You wouldn't expect Philadelphia University to be the hangman for such a
thoughtless act. The East Falls institution has been a devoted curator for
its stunning collection of 19th-century mansions on Schoolhouse Lane, built
when the ridge was Philadelphia's most exclusive neighborhood. It has put
them to good use as offices, classrooms and residences. Yet, the university
is now emptying out its student center, an 1880s house designed by George T.
Pearson and known as Red Gate, for the sole purpose of eliminating it. The
sprawling Queen Anne-style structure, which features an oak-paneled parlor
worthy of a Henry James novel, is slated to come down within a few weeks.
It would be bad enough if the university were demolishing the house because
it needed the land to build something new. But no replacement is planned for
several years. Red Gate's site, across from the library and bordering the
campus' main quadrangle, will simply be planted with grass, turning an
elegant landscape statement into a dangling, unfinished sentence.

The School of Architecture faculty sent a letter to president James P.
Gallagher in April, begging him to reconsider the demolition plan.
Acknowledging that the house needs expensive repairs, they proposed several
ways to defray the costs. But Gallagher argues that it's not worth the
investment because the house's charm has been undermined by decades of crude
renovations.

It's true that Red Gate, built for the railroad magnate F.J. Kimball, has
lost much of its original, picturesque detailing. The lacy wooden
gingerbread around the porch is long gone. At some point, the rustic stone
facade was slathered in a bland stucco. During its years as the university's
student center, the interiors were subjected to heavy wear.
Yet the essence of Pearson's Queen Anne design survives. The house still
proudly boasts its magnificent parlor, ceilings garlanded with plaster
vines, deep window nooks, a limestone fireplace, and cozy rooms with bay
windows and built-in cabinets.

Even in the house's debased state, argues Jeffrey Cohen, an architectural
historian at Bryn Mawr College, Pearson's exuberance shines through. A
contemporary of Frank Furness', Pearson designed dozens of houses in the
burgeoning suburbs of Germantown, Chestnut Hill, and the Main Line in the
late 19th century. Suburban living was coming into vogue, and Pearson's
clients liked to pretend they were living in medieval English cottages, even
though the houses he designed for them were far bigger and equipped with the
latest conveniences. His Queen Anne houses were eclectic, asymmetrical and
colorful and included "a riot of stuff," says Cohen. That's one reason so
much decoration was later removed.

If bad renovations were the criteria for determining the fate of historic
buildings, hardly any of Philadelphia's would survive. While Gallagher
argues that it would take $4 million to fix Red Gate, no one expects a
faithful restoration - only that the university hold onto its past until its
future is clearer.

To get a sense of its historic holdings, the university is just completing a
building survey with a grant from the Getty Foundation. Yet, strangely,
Pearson's mansion was not included in the study. It's as if the school had
written off the building without a second look.

For an institution that specializes in teaching design, the demolition of a
still serviceable and historically valuable house hardly sets a good
example. What will the students in the new master's program in green design
think when they see the sturdy mansion being taken apart rather than reused?
When the school erected a new $8 million classroom building in 2001, it
purposely outfitted it with gables and schist to give it the veneer of a
historic college building. Now the university is rushing to dump the real
thing.

Why the haste? Although the school is opening a new student center in the
fall, there are plenty of potential uses for the old one. If Pearson's
English cottage is really uninhabitable without extensive renovations, just
lock the doors and let it sit. But Gallagher dismisses such suggestions with
the zeal of a real estate developer. Showing potential donors the grassy
lot, he says, "will be a pretty nice sales opportunity."

Pearson wasn't Philadelphia's greatest 19th-century architect, and his
Kimball house wasn't his best work. But as one in a group of mansions on
Schoolhouse Lane, it helps us recall the memory of a lost time, when
America's richest bankers and railroad moguls surveyed their domains from
English cottages arrayed on this lofty perch overlooking Center City.
Nothing can ever bring back those days, of course. But it is all too easy to
lose the little we still have left of them.
 
 
 
Frederick J. Kimball
 Frm Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Frederick J. Kimball              
Born       
March 6, 1844
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania                
Died        
July 27, 1903
                
 
Frederick James Kimball (March 6, 1844 - July 27, 1903) was a civil
engineer. He is credited as the president of the Norfolk and Western Railway
during its early development years and for the development of Pocahontas
coalfields in Virginia and West Virginia.
 
Kimball was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At 18, he went to work for
the Erie Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad as a rodman, a menial worker.
After a short time he went to England for two years, where he studied
English railroading by working in the system. His return to the United
States marked several job changes, each of which was a promotion. In 1878,
he became the prime mover behind construction and growth of the Shenandoah
Valley Railroad which was building up the Shenandoah Valley.
 
At a 1881 foreclosure auction, the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad
(AM&O), an east-west railroad across Virginia controlled by William Mahone
was purchased by E.W. Clark and Co., a private banking firm in Philadelphia
which controlled the Shenandoah Valley Railroad then under construction.
 
Kimball, who was a partner in the Clark firm, headed the new line, which was
renamed Norfolk & Western Railway, and consolidated it with the Shenandoah
Valley Railroad. For the junction for the Shenandoah and the Norfolk &
Western, Kimball and his board of directors selected a small Virginia
village called Big Lick, on the Roanoke River. The small town was later
renamed Roanoke, Virginia.
 
Under the Kimball era, the Norfolk & Western became famous for manufacturing
steam locomotives in-house at its Roanoke, Virginia shops. Kimball, whose
interest in geology was responsible for the opening of the Pocahontas
coalfields in western Virginia and West Virginia, pushed N&W lines through
the wilds of West Virginia, north to Columbus, Ohio and Cincinnati, Ohio,
and south to Durham, North Carolina and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This
gave the railroad the route structure it was to use for more than 60 years.
 
In 1885, several small mining companies representing about 400,000 acres
(1,600 km²) of bituminous coal reserves grouped together to form the
coalfields' largest landowner, the Philadelphia-based Flat-Top Coal Land
Association. Norfolk and Western Railway bought the Association and
reorganized it as the Pocahontas Coal and Coke Co., which it later renamed
Pocahontas Land Corp, now a subsidiary of Norfolk Southern.
 
Transported by the N&W and neighboring Virginian Railway (VGN), Pocahontas
coal fueled half the world's navies during the 20th century and today stokes
steel mills and power plants all over the globe.
 
Kimball died in 1903, and was succeeded as president of the Norfolk and
Western Railway by Lucius E. Johnson.
 
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