The grand changes to the area that would be known as “Wyncote” were, in 1852, just brewing in the still distant social and geographical reaches of the Philadelphia business world. In that year, a group of industrious businessmen received authorization from the state legislature to form a new railroad. Perhaps in no other aspect of late nineteenth century life had the benefits of the industrial revolution been so manifest as the railroad frenzy that gripped the nation and would continue to build steam throughout the period. In 1830, the first rails in the United States totaled only twenty-three miles. By 1850, nine thousand miles covered the country. In another twenty years, after the Civil War, the growth in railroading and the country produced a total of fifty-three thousand miles. Every investor with money to spare hurried to find a railroad to harbor his investment. On April 8, 1852, an Act of Legislature granted life to the Philadelphia, Easton, and Water Gap Rail Road. Less than a year later, it would be re-christened the more comprehensive sounding North Pennsylvania Rail Road.

The name bore testimony to the business war that pitted Philadelphia industrialists and merchants against those of neighboring New York. It was not the commuter railroad we know today, as the founders were more concerned about moving freight and goods to the city. Passengers were almost an afterthought as long as the coal got to the city. An announcement of a public meeting in the city called citizens to a “Philadelphia Mass Meeting” with the cry “Philadelphians, Hark!” and continued with a harangue to gain support.

It is no small cause of wonderment by today’s expectations of legalities, regulatory gridlock, and NIMBYism how a railroad formed, funded, surveyed a route, obtained the land of right-of-way, laid level the route, blasted through solid rock cuts, obtained rolling stock including three complicated locomotives, laid nineteen miles of rail – all within a period of less than three years. One railroad historian explained that “black powder, as the chief explosive, and the pick, hand shove, dump wagon, and wheelbarrow were still ranking contractors’ equipment in railroad construction.” But Baldwin itself, the largest manufacturing operation in the world at the time, produced the locomotives for the railroad on a sixty-day production schedule. Compared to the excruciating wait for today’s rail car replacements, the whole enterprise seems an accomplishment nothing short of miraculous.

One element that contributed to this alacrity lay in the problem of land acquisition that was so conveniently deferred by the directors. The 1853 charter and, by reference, the 1849 Pennsylvania law regulating railroads allowed the company almost total authority to go where they wanted and assume any land for their road. Section 10 of the law specified that the President and Directors of the Company shall have the power and authority “by themselves, their engineers, supervisors, agents, artisans, and workmen to survey, ascertain, locate, fix, mark, and determine such route for a Railroad as they may deem expedient, not however passing through any burying-ground or place of public worship.”

Only the dead or the praying could escape the appetite of the voracious railroad planners and of course, with such prerogatives, the company could move quickly. In the case of the Olde Wyncote tract, the railroad did not get around to settling with William C. Kent and Edward M. Davis, two wealthy owners represented in the tract, until July of 1857, almost three years after the route was settled and two years after the trains started running through their land.

The first ride from downtown Philadelphia to Gwynedd on the North Pennsylvania line occurred on Monday, July 2, 1855. Pulled by the new “Cohocksink” steam locomotive that was delivered in May, a train-full of dignitaries boarded at the “new and very commodious station” at Front and Willow streets (near the docks and today’s Waterfront Square Condo complex). The event was recorded by the Philadelphia Inquirer and indicated the excitement that accompanied the affair.


Yesterday was celebrated by an important and auspicious event, which may be termed the harbinger of an increased traffic for Philadelphia, through a new and highly interesting region of Pennsylvania. We refer to the opening of the First Division of the Northern Pennsylvania Railroad to Gwynedd, a distance of about nineteen miles. A Committee of the City Councils, representatives of the press, and many prominent citizens were invited on the occasion, and the party assembled must have been nearly one hundred in number. . . . We were whirled along with great speed over an exceedingly beautiful country, in which highly cultivated farms and fields were agreeable [sic] alternated with majestic and park-like groves, hill and dale, and watered with sparkling brooks and streams. (Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 1855)


The “Cohocksink”, successful on this celebrated day, would survive until its dismantling in 1878 due to old age, but her sisters would soon be destroyed in a conflagration of their own making within a year in a tragic head-on collision at nearby Fort Washington that took many lives.

At the advent of the railroad, two land transfers in particular marked the transition between the old and the new in the Olde Wyncote tract: the purchases of the Kent estate and the Heacock farm. The Kent purchase was the prototype of the new style of land use in the tract and the surrounding region. It represented the first time that a wealthy Philadelphia businessman purchased a large amount of property solely for its recreational value – for the pleasure of the surroundings and as a summer retreat – rather than for its farming value. It was a bellwether of the wave of wealthy industrialists to follow. Conversely, the purchase of farmland by Joseph Heacock was the last major purchase of farmland for farming purposes to occur in the tract. It singularly marked the end of an era.