About us
The Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides holds monthly meetings which feature a guest speaker on a topic of historical significance in Philadelphia or a field trip for a behind-the-scenes tour of a local historic site. Meetings are open to aspiring and working tour guides as well as anyone with an interest in Philadelphia-focused history. Attend one meeting for free and then it is $60 to join the association for the year or $10 per monthly meeting event. If you love and want to learn more about this amazing, vibrant city of 'firsts' - the birthplace of the United States - please join us!
Upcoming events
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Hannah Callowhill Penn
Philly's Gourmet Steaks, 114 Market St., Philadelphia, pa, USThe next monthly meeting of the Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) will be held on Wednesday, March 11 at 7 pm. In celebration of Women's History Month, we'll learn more about William Penn's second wife, Hannah (née Callowhill) from Doug Miller, the museum director of Pennsbury Manor, a reconstruction of William Penn’s country estate in Morrisville, PA. Doug will discuss the trials and triumphs of this extraordinary woman who ran the government for six years after Penn suffered a stroke and for eight years after he died.
Hannah Penn would serve as Pennsylvania’s first female governor, although she was never granted the title. Born into a wealthy family of first-generation Quakers, friend Hannah would eventually marry Pennsylvania’s founder, William Penn. Theirs would be a union that would influence the world we live in today. Hear about her leadership when Penn is debilitated by stroke, her conflict with her stepson, the loss of her beloved mother, the boundary battle with Maryland, and even a tidbit about her courtship with Penn.
Come early for dinner and drinks! The meeting will be in-person at Philly’s Gourmet Steaks, 114 Market Street, upstairs, and livestreamed on Zoom. The Zoom link will be available in the APT Tour Talk newsletter the week of the meeting; non-members should contact Marianne Ruane president@phillyguides.org no later than 5 pm the day of the meeting to receive the link. A recording will be available on the APT YouTube page for a month following the talk.
APT meetings are open to aspiring and working tour guides as well as anyone with an interest in Philadelphia-focused history. Attend one meeting for free and then it is $60 to join the association for the year or $10 per monthly meeting in-person event. Zoom meetings are free. Please join us for convivial company, good food, fascinating presentations, and lively discussions!
7 attendees
March Book Club
Location not specified yetThe Association of Philadelphia Tour Guides (APT) will hold its next book club meeting on Tuesday, March 17 at 7 pm on Zoom. There is no fee to attend and everyone is welcome. Participants should come ready to discuss the book. The selection is The Power to Deny by APT’s own Wendy Long Stanley.
It is not uncommon for people to live in Horsham or some place very near Horsham for years and years before they somehow happen to discover Graeme Park. But when Wendy Stanley moved here from Canada almost 20 years go, it took her only a few weeks to find it and only minutes to become excited about it. She learned a bit about Elizabeth Graeme’s life as a privileged but restricted woman of the eighteenth century and started to write a novel about her. Wendy describes her book, The Power to Deny, as historical fiction. But it is hardly fiction at all. There is very little in it that is not documented or did not actually happen.
That is because Wendy did such extensive, detailed research about her subject. She visited Elizabeth-related sites in Philadelphia – her burial site at Christ Church, the graveyard at Old Swedes Church where Graeme and Henry Fergusson were married, the house where her sister Jane lived, as well as lots of libraries and, of course, Graeme Park. While poring through an original journal at the Pennsylvania Historical Society library, written in solitude with a quill pen by Elizabeth’s own hand, a pressed flower fell out of the pages. It had been there nearly three centuries!
Elizabeth’s life story seems a natural for a novel, considering her struggles in romance, as a writer, as a property owner during the Revolutionary War, and generally as a female during that turbulent era. Wendy put it all together in this book, which took her eight years of working in solitude at her computer, when time away from juggling all of the obligations of life as a 21st century wife, mother, and employee would allow, to write.
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.
5 attendees
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