Philadelphia History Meetup

The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) has arranged a visit to Historic Rittenhouse Town on Monday, June 15 at 11 am. This will be a two-hour outing with a guided tour for $6.

Historic Rittenhouse Town, located in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, is an historic village featuring seven original buildings dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, including the 1707 Rittenhouse Homestead and the 1753 Bake House.

In 1687, papermaker William Rittenhouse purchased a plot of land by a tributary of the Wissahickon Creek and with his son, Nicholas, built the first paper mill in British North America. For 40 years the Rittenhouse family were the only papermakers in America! Eight generations of the Rittenhouse family lived and worked there for almost 200 years. At its peak in the mid-19th century, Historic Rittenhouse Town was a self-contained industrial community comprised of about forty buildings which produced paper, textiles, and grain.

Today Rittenhouse Town is a designated National Historic Landmark District that is a museum and education center offering historic tours, papermaking workshops, hearth cooking, demonstrations, and more.
The discounted $6 registration fee can be paid in the event listing on the APT website. Deadline to sign up is Sunday June 14 at midnight. Check out this map from their website. Contact APT Director-at-Large vpmccafferty@msn.com with any questions. Join us for an enlightening and fun day!

The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) will hold its next book club meeting on Tuesday, July 21 at 7 pm on Zoom. The selection is Grave Dealings: Body Snatching in Philadelphia, 1762-1883 by Tim Dewysockie. (BTW, Dewysockie will be the speaker at the APT monthly meeting in October – just in time for Halloween!).

In the 18th century the first American medical school was established in Philadelphia. Following the model of European universities, anatomical lectures were conducted with cadavers. But where did the bodies come from? Dissection was viewed as a fate worse than death, and the only legal source of “stiffs” was executed criminals. But there were not enough. As the medical profession and its need for “anatomical material” grew, a new, macabre practice emerged: body snatching.

Body snatchers secretly obtained bodies from cemeteries and sold them to medical schools for dissection. But how did body snatching work? How did body snatchers and medical schools avoid getting caught, and what happened when they did? How did the era of the body snatchers end? Grave Dealings: Body Snatching In Philadelphia, 1762-1883 digs through archives to unearth the forgotten history of a time of graveyard patrols and anatomy riots, when the dead needed protection from the living. Philadelphia pioneered and became the center of American medical education and practice–and body snatching–in the 18th and 19th centuries.

There is no fee to join the book club and everyone is welcome! Participants should come ready to discuss the book. The Zoom link will be sent out the week of the meeting in the APT Tour Talk email. Non-members who wish to attend should contact APT Secretary Pam Covey phillyguides@gmail.com by 5 pm the day of the meeting to get the Zoom link.