Highlighting the rich history of the Byberry neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia by activating four historic sites along or near the Poquessing Creek Trail through public programs and historic restoration and interpretation.
THE TRAGIC, TANGLED TALE OF THE BENJAMIN RUSH BIRTHPLACE
by Jack McCarthy, Project Director
Benjamin Rush was born on December 24, 1745, in a modest two-story stone house in Byberry, a rural part of Philadelphia County, about thirteen miles north of what was then the Philadelphia city limit. The house had been built around 1690 by Benjamin’s great-great grandfather, English immigrant John Rush, a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), who came to America with his extended family and settled in Byberry in 1683. In 1684, William Penn granted John Rush 250 acres in the area and sometime after that the family built the house.
Benjamin lived in the home for only a few years; when he was about four the family moved into the city, where his father had a gunsmith shop. After his father died in 1751, his mother sent young Benjamin and his brother to a boarding school in Maryland. Benjamin went on to attend what is now Princeton University, apprentice with a noted Philadelphia doctor, and study medicine at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Rush returned to Philadelphia in 1769 and became a leading citizen of the city, a respected physician, educator, and social and political activist. A delegate to the 1776 Continental Congress, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and influential founding father during the revolutionary period, he later founded or co-founded a number of important institutions and was at the forefront of many social issues of the era: advocating for the humane treatment of the mentally ill (he is considered the “Father of American Psychiatry”), public health, the abolition of slavery, penal reform, and free education for all.
The house in Byberry in which Benjamin was born remained in the Rush family until 1765, when it was purchased by Jonathan Parry, a local Quaker and member of Byberry Friends Meeting. The Parry family would own the property for almost 200 years.
In 1812, a year before his death, Benjamin Rush visited his birthplace with his son. It was a moving experience for the sixty-six-year-old doctor, as he recounted in a letter to his good friend, former US President John Adams:
I was called lately to visit a patient in that neighborhood and having with me my youngest son I thought I would avail myself of the occasion to visit the farm on which I was born and where my ancestors for several generations had lived and died. In approaching it, I was agitated in a manner I did not expect. The access was changed, but everything around it was nearly the same as the days of my boyhood, at which time I left it. The family there, though strangers to me, received me kindly, and discovered a disposition to satisfy my curiosity and gratify my feelings. I soon asked permission to conduct my son upstairs to see the room in which I drew my first breath, and made my first unwelcome noise in the world, and where first began the affection and cares of my beloved and excellent mother. I next asked for a large cedar tree which once stood before the door, planted by my father’s hand. It had been converted into the pillars of the piazza before the house. Filled with emotion, I embraced the one nearest to me. I next inquired for the orchard planted by the same hand, and was conducted to an eminence behind the house, where I saw a number of apple trees which still bore fruit, to each of which I felt something like the affection of a brother.
The building, which is stone, bears the marks of age and decay. On one of the stones near the front door I discovered the letters J.R. Before the house flows a small but deep creek abounding in pan-fish. The farm consists of ninety acres in a highly cultivated state. The owner did not want to sell, but I begged if he should incline to dispose of it to make me or one of my surviving sons the first offer. While I sat in its common room I looked at its walls, and thought how often they had been made vocal by my ancestors to conversations about wolves, bears and snakes in the first settlement; afterwards about cows and calves, colts, lambs, etc., and at all times with prayers and praises, and chapters read audibly from the Bible; for all who inhabited it of my family, were pious people, chiefly of the sects of Quakers and Baptists.
Byberry was a rural area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was incorporated as a township within Philadelphia County in 1794 and then absorbed into the City of Philadelphia in the 1854 city-county consolidation. There was little change through the mid-twentieth century, but the area saw tremendous growth in the post-World War II period, with large-scale housing developments, shopping centers, and roads replacing centuries-old family farms.
Much of this development was done by the Korman Corporation, one of the largest real estate developers in Northeast Philadelphia in the twentieth century. In 1965 Korman began construction on Rushwood, a residential complex in the eastern part of the former Byberry Township. The development took its name from the Benjamin Rush birthplace house, which although some 275 years old and showing signs of its age, was still standing in the middle of the planned development when Korman began construction.
It is here that the story of the house becomes tangled, and ultimately tragic. Despite determined efforts by city and state agencies, preservationists, and medical and historical societies, the house would fall victim to the wrecking ball. For much of the late 1950s and 1960s prospects appeared good, however. The Philadelphia Historical Commission certified the home as historic in 1957 and the Philadelphia County Medical Society expressed interest in acquiring it in the early 1960s, before Korman purchased the large tract of land on which the house was located in 1965.
With Korman’s blessing, the City of Philadelphia pursued state and federal funds to acquire the house and restore it as a historic site. “City acquisition of the 250-year-old Benjamin Rush house—and its eventual restoration—now appears to be a virtual certainty,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on November 6, 1965. The city secured a federal grant for the project in 1967 and in July of that year the city Commissioner of Recreation reported that the purchase should take place by the end of the year. Noted preservation architect John Milner was brought in to develop restoration plans for the house.
At this point, Dr. Daniel Blain, Director of the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry, the large state-run psychiatric residential facility a few miles away on Roosevelt Boulevard, came forward with a plan to acquire the home and move it to the hospital campus. Hospital executives received state approval to pursue the project, which they saw as a fitting way to honor Benjamin Rush, the “Father of American Psychiatry,” especially since there were plans to create a new Benjamin Rush State Park directly across Roosevelt Boulevard from the hospital. The city ended its efforts to acquire the house as a result, but the state project languished. In January 1969, Korman announced that it would retain the property and arrange for restoration of the house itself.
In the meantime, the last tenants who had been renting the house moved out and it became subject to vandalism and arson, losing some of its architectural integrity and becoming dangerous. Suddenly, and without warning, the city demolished the house on February 28, 1969. It was widely reported that the demolition was a tragic mistake—that the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspection was given an incorrect address and destroyed the wrong house. L&I had supposedly checked with the Historical Commission first, but the Commission had an obsolete address on file for the house, one that did not take into account the many new roads in the area with all the recent development.
The official story notwithstanding, it was later revealed that the demolition was, in fact, intentional. Edward Dawson, chief of field operations at L&I at the time, had concluded that the house was a public nuisance and dangerous and ordered that it be taken down. The true story was not revealed until forty-some years later, when Dawson’s son Peter wrote an article for the online Frankford Gazette about it.
In the article, published on November 21, 2011, Peter recounted that, while a student at Father Judge High School in Northeast Philadelphia in the late 1960s, one of his teachers, a Catholic priest and history buff, expressed his outrage at the sudden demolition of the house. Peter decided to write a paper on the subject and asked his father what had happened. After much initial reluctance, his father finally told him the truth: After the house had become dangerous, L&I boarded up the windows and doors and warned the Historical Commission that something must be done, but following a prolonged period of inaction and some dangerous episodes, Dawson ordered that it be taken down.
Immediately after the demolition, Dr. Blain revived his original plan of having the house reconstructed on the Byberry State Hospital grounds. Blain and his team rescued the stones and other surviving architectural elements from the rubble of the house and had them moved to the hospital. The stones were put in a pile and the wooden pieces were stored in a garage on the property. A large billboard was erected at a corner of the hospital property, the prominent intersection of Roosevelt Boulevard and Southampton Roads, proclaiming “The Benjamin Rush House will be erected on this parcel of land.”
Unfortunately, like previous efforts with the house, the project languished and never came to fruition. Sometime after the state hospital closed in 1990, the surviving architectural remnants of the house were moved to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which later transferred them to the Pennsylvania State Museum in Harrisburg. The State Museum deemed most of the artifacts too damaged and not worthy of preservation and deaccessioned everything but one window jamb. The pile of stones from the house remained where it had been left on the Hospital grounds, however.
In 1975 that section of the hospital property became part of Benjamin Rush State Park. Local residents, knowing the story behind the stones, began taking some of them as keepsakes, so in the early 2000s park staff moved the stones to Fort Washington State Park. When Benjamin Rush State Park underwent a major renovation in 2013, the stones were used to construct the two stone columns at the entrance to the park.
One of the goals of the Poquessing Trail of History project is to build a representation of the house on the grounds of Benjamin Rush State Park, using the original stones. Appropriately, Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia is working on this aspect of the project with John Milner Architects, the firm founded by the architect who was developing restoration plans for the house when it was demolished in 1969. John Milner himself, semi-retired from his namesake firm, has taken an active interest in the project.
Sources Consulted:
- Rush: Revolution, Madness, & The Visionary Doctor Who Became a Found Father, by Stephen Fried, Crown, 2018.
- Benjamin Rush online portal, University of Pennsylvania: Home – Benjamin Rush Portal – Guides at Penn Libraries.
- Benjamin Rush House files, Philadelphia Historical Commission
- The Philadelphia Inquirer and Evening Bulletin photos and clippings on Benjamin Rush House, Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries,
- Benjamin Rush files Byberry Library, Byberry Friends Meeting, Philadelphia Historical Commission,
- Peter Dawson, “The Price of Inaction at Adams Avenue,” Frankford Gazette, November 11, 2011. Available at: The Price of Inaction at Adams Avenue – Frankford Gazette
- Author conversations with Eric Elhein, retired manager of Benjamin Rush State Park, and Harold Rosenthal, former Northeast Philadelphia activist and attorney for Somerton Civic Association, January 2025.
