The Highlands, A Yellow Fever Refuge in Stone

In seventeen ninety-six, Philadelphia merchant and state senator Anthony Morris built a fieldstone country house on two hundred acres in what is now Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. The purpose was urgency: yellow fever had been ravaging Philadelphia, killing thousands, and Morris needed a safe place for his family to retreat when the fevers returned each summer. The house is said to have been designed in the late Georgian style by Timothy Matlack, the Philadelphia official who engrossed the Declaration of Independence in his elegant hand.

Morris sold the estate in eighteen thirteen to wine merchant George Sheaff, whose family held it for over a century. In nineteen seventeen, Caroline Sinkler purchased it and undertook Colonial Revival renovations that defined its present appearance. Today the Highlands is a preserved historic site, its fieldstone walls and formal gardens offering a glimpse of the prosperous country life that Philadelphia's merchant class built just beyond the reach of the city's fevers.