‘Still full of vitality’
Living and working — with history, nature, ghosts and water snakes — in a 300-year-old house
As resident stewards of the nearly 300-year-old house known as Glen Fern, Craig Johnson and Carol Adams are immersed in the many splendors of Wissahickon Valley Park.
The couple live on a Mount Airy lane that plunges into the valley through thick woods, curving to an end at the 15-room assemblage of locally quarried stone they call home. The front door is less than 100 feet from the Wissahickon Creek.
“We listen to it sing,” said Johnson, a naturalist who designs signage, interpretive panels and educational programs for parks and historic sites.
Adams, a retired literacy teacher in the Philadelphia public schools and now a mentor for instructional coaches in Bucks County, said: “The creek is a constant presence ... and the house itself has a deep presence. It brings us calm.”
Johnson’s design studio, Interpret Green, signed a 15-year lease with the city in 2011. In addition to the $160,000 in repairs the company has made to what he said was a “barely inhabitable” house, rent is about $1,900 a month.
“Philadelphia Parks & Recreation has 15 sites similar to Glen Fern with long-term leases through the Fairmount Park Conservancy (enabling) nonprofits and businesses to adaptively reuse historic properties,” Maita Soukup, the department’s communications director, said in an email.
“Glen Fern is a wonderful place,” Johnson said, “but it has its complications.”
Ghosts, reptiles, and a dream
Among those complications are falling trees, seven ghosts of Hessian soldiers in the cellar — although they eventually were persuaded to depart after a visit from a spirit clearer — and northern water snakes along the creek. The snakes are numerous, but not venomous.
Adams said that when visitors learn there are snakes in the vicinity, “a lot of them want to leave. But I’m thrilled they’re here.”
The couple built a habitat for the reptiles after a park visitor put one in a jar and offered to sell it to them for $5. On another occasion, a visitor seemed about to kill a pregnant water snake.
Soon afterward, Johnson had a vivid dream in which the reptiles were pleading for help. “The next day I realized that wasn’t like a regular dream,” he said. “It was like instructions. So we asked if we could build a refuge for the water snakes.”
The fenced-in arrangement of creek-side rocks, as well as an interpretive sign, seem to have reduced disruptive interactions between visitors and snakes, Adams said. When she and Johnson are outside, the snakes will sometimes sun themselves — or even form a “mating ball” of males and a single female — in plain sight, despite being “not the friendliest snakes,” said Ned Gilmore, a collections manager at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University.
Gilmore helped conduct a wildlife survey in the park and praised the couple’s efforts to protect a native species.
Although they are neither park rangers nor tour guides, Adams and Johnson are deeply knowledgeable about the history and ecology of Glen Fern and its environs, said Ruffian Tittmann, executive director of the 3,000-member nonprofit group Friends of the Wissahickon.
“The city has come up with mechanisms to preserve Glen Fern and other great pieces of Philadelphia’s past and keep them active and usable,” she said. “Craig and Carol are in the park every day because they live there. If there’s a concern, or if a tree falls, they let the city know. It’s great for the park to have these lines of communication.”
Despite the obvious appeal — plenty of trees and quiet — Maura McCarthy, executive director of the nonprofit Fairmount Park Conservancy, said living in an old building in a city park isn’t for everyone.
“It’s not necessarily easy,” she said. “You have to have a clear idea of why you’re there.”
Such is the joy Johnson and Adams take living in and working from their home at Glen Fern that, depending on the time and circumstance, they will allow a visitor a glimpse of the interior of the house, the oldest portion of which was built in 1735.
The original structure consisted of a single room with an enormous hearth that remains a centerpiece of today’s much larger house. Glen Fern was originally known as the Livezey house, for the family that bought the house and corn-grinding mill on the property — one of many mills along the creek in the second half of the 18th century.
Johnson said that as he understands the story, during or after the Battle of Germantown on Oct. 4, 1777, seven Hessian soldiers foraging for food brutally attacked several women who were alone at the Livezey house and were afterward executed by the British there.
Despite descriptions on some vintage postcards, the Livezey house never served as a headquarters for Gen. George Washington in 1776. “This false legend was made (up) by early-19th-century postcard makers in Germany,” Johnson said. “There’s a lot of lore and legends around this house, along with the actual facts.”
Adams described living at Glen Fern as “cohabiting with nature” and as a source of connection.
“I feel rooted,” she said. “Rooted in the land and in the house. Which we treat as a member of our family.”
Johnson said Glen Fern “is both a teacher and an inspiration because of its resilience ... to be nearly 300 years old and still full of vitality, and beauty, is for me the biggest gift.”