early 1900s
The Bodine Family
07
Samuel and Eleanor Bodine
At the turn of the 20th century, Samuel Taylor Bodine (1854-1932), head of United Gas Improvement Company, acquired the property. Samuel Bodine had an impressive career and was a member of many prominent social organizations in Philadelphia and on the Main Line. But there are many notable accomplishments *not* listed in his biography that give us insights into why the legacy he and his family left at the Bodine homesteads of Stoneleigh and Oakwell is worthy of celebration and preservation.
This cutting-edge complex, designed by architect Frank Miles Day before 1903, was where Bodine’s innovative staff (including respected Superintendent Francis Canning) would produce award-winning flowers and vegetables. We will visit this complex later on our tour.
Along the way, Bodine served on the Board of Directors of the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching (1900), joined the Farmer’s Club of PA (1901), served on the PA Chestnut Tree Blight Commission (1913) and as president of the PA Horticultural Society (1914), and was honorary VP of the American Association for the Advancement of Science when it welcomed the new year of 1915 during its winter meeting in Philadelphia.
As WWI expanded overseas, Bodine served on the Executive Committee of the Citizens Soldier’s Aid Committee (1916), and after the US was drawn into the war in 1917, he chaired the Committee on Disbursements for the War Welfare Council that organized re-employment of veterans.
On the home front at Stoneleigh, there was a shift away from the previous years of acclaim at Flower Shows, and instead the greenhouse complex, sprawling vegetable and fruit gardens, Superintendent’s Cottage, and 2 story dormitory called “Squirrel Inn” (all at the back of the property, out of sight of the mansion), became places that fed the community and the training grounds for women aspiring to careers in gardening and horticulture.
Through newspapers, we learn that in 1917 Samuel T. Bodine was a leader of the “Main Line Community War Garden Committee.” The Committee organized donations of unused land one mile north and south of the Pennsylvania Rail Road all the way from Merion to Villanova along with seed, equipment, horses, and labor to produce potatoes, beans, cabbages, carrots, turnips, and onions that sustained the community through wartime shortages. We will learn more later about the Bodine family's wartime efforts on this tour.
In decades of correspondence about landscape design work at the Bodine family’s Stoneleigh and Oakwell estates, one name appears over and over, shaping decisions about landscape grading, garden placement, and trees planted: Eleanor Gray Warden Bodine (1860-1927), aka Mrs. Samuel T. Bodine. She was a woman firmly in charge and looking to the future. Historical records also show that Eleanor Bodine’s vision for Stoneleigh went beyond its beauty and we will return to this later on in the tour.
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