Cyrus Curtis — The Man Behind the Saturday Evening Post

Near this spot in Wyncote stood Lyndon, the country estate of Cyrus H. K. Curtis, the man who built the most powerful magazine empire in American history. Curtis moved to Philadelphia in eighteen seventy-six and never left. He founded the Curtis Publishing Company, and from its presses came publications that shaped what millions of Americans read each week.

The Saturday Evening Post, under his ownership, became the most widely read magazine in the country. The Ladies' Home Journal, which Curtis founded with his wife, pioneered the idea of women as a serious readership and advertising market. He later added The Philadelphia Inquirer to his holdings.

Curtis lived at Lyndon from eighteen ninety-one until his death in nineteen thirty-three. Nearly all of the estate is gone now. Only Curtis Hall, built in nineteen oh three as the home's music room, survives. The grounds, which the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed, became the Curtis Arboretum, now a public park maintained by Cheltenham Township.