Guest Books

This collection is made up of material relating to Cedar Grove, a historic house administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Fairmount Park. It is primarily photographic in nature. These images document the building and its furnishings, establishing the way it would have looked in the late nineteenth-century.

Photographs make up the first three series. They are divided between exterior shots from the 1880s, interior shots from 1887, and photographs from circa 1906 of Morris family furniture in Compton, the family seat in Chestnut Hill which is now the Morris Arboretum. This furniture was collected by Lydia Morris, who moved Cedar Grove to Fairmount Park, and her brother. It was donated to the museum and now fills Cedar Grove.

The “Various” series contains an invitation to a Wistar party in 1908, an inventory from 1989 and the collection’s original housing, and a glass plate portrait of a man, labelled Morris.

The final series contains guest books from Cedar Grove.