Stenton: James Logan's World in Germantown

Near the northern end of this route, in a quiet corner of Germantown, Philadelphia, stands one of the most significant and least visited colonial houses in the United States. Stenton was completed in seventeen thirty by James Logan, and to understand this building you first have to understand the man.

James Logan arrived in Philadelphia in sixteen ninety-nine as secretary to William Penn. When Penn returned to England two years later, Logan remained and became the colony's central figure: merchant, politician, scientist, scholar, chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and eventually mayor of Philadelphia. He was, as his contemporaries put it, a universal man in the Renaissance tradition, and Stenton was the physical expression of that self-conception.

Logon named the estate after his father's village in Scotland and built it on five hundred and eleven acres of farmland in rural Germantown between seventeen twenty-three and seventeen thirty. The house itself is Georgian in style but distinguished by an unusual simplicity. Logan was a Quaker, and the building reflects the tension between his considerable wealth and his faith's demand for plain living. It is restrained where a Virginia planter's house would be showy, functional where it could have been decorative.

Logon assembled a personal library of nearly three thousand volumes inside these walls, one of the largest in colonial America. After his death, the collection was donated to what became the Library Company of Philadelphia, the city's first lending library, founded, it is worth noting, by Logan's friend and sometime rival Benjamin Franklin.

During the Battle of Germantown in October seventeen seventy-seven, both British and American troops moved through the estate. The house survived the engagement intact. It remained in the Logan family for six generations before passing to the City of Philadelphia. Today Stenton stands as one of the earliest, best-preserved, and most authentic Georgian houses in the country, a place where the Quaker intellectual tradition and colonial statecraft once occupied the same rooms.