First Indian Rock Hotel — Wissahickon Valley Park

The First Indian Rock Hotel in 1872: a stone roadhouse with a two-tier veranda, figures at the upper railing, and a man in an apron by the outside staircase — The house in 1872, from the photograph. Hold the plate, and the years fall away.

The house stood on the drive north of the Rex Avenue bridge, in the shadow of the great ledge the valley calls Council Rock, and its keeper was Reuben Sands — Rube. For many years, the city's own historians wrote, it was the most famous road house around Philadelphia. Up the drive at Valley Green the keeper was not well liked, and the trade came here instead: to the long veranda, the rocking chairs, and the sheds across the road where the teams were left standing.

One photograph of the house survives, taken about 1872, and it is full of people. Two men lean at the veranda columns. A woman and a young girl stand at the second-storey railing. On the side staircase stands a man in an apron, caught mid-duty, his face turned half away. The camera kept every one of them. The record kept none of their names.

Above the house, on the road, stood a stone fountain built in 1854 — the first public drinking fountain in Philadelphia, the gift of John Cook, who cut the stone, and Charles Megargee, who gave the spring. It was carved with two Latin promises: pro bono publico — for the public good — and esto perpetua — let it be forever. Drivers watered their horses there and climbed the path to the rock, where a wooden statue had watched since 1856.

The books cannot agree on how the house ended. One says the park bought it in 1872 and closed it; another says it stood until a taking in 1887. Both are wrong as written: the park's own report for 1878 lists the Indian Rock Hotel open for business inside the park, one of seven refreshment places on the drive. Sands himself died in August 1884. After that the record thins to a line in a survey, and then to nothing at all.

By the early years of the new century, travellers found only foundations on the left of the drive. Today there is not even that — a bench, a stone bridge, the wide gravel going on without it. Of the seven houses on this creek, this is the one that left nothing to knock on. The stone figure on the rock above keeps the watch alone.

The stone statue of Tedyuscung crouching on Council Rock above the hotel site, among the trees — Council Rock, above the house — the wooden figure of 1856, then the stone Tedyuscung of 1902, who keeps the watch still.

The Cellar — What the Record Holds

The likenesses in this house are drawn, as the spirit photographers drew theirs — this one from the hotel's own photograph, R. Newell & Son's stereograph of about 1872, as it was printed in Joseph D. Bicknell's The Wissahickon in History, Song and Story (1908), page 18. The present-day plate is drawn from a photograph of the ground as it stands. The words are from the record, and the record is this:

The opening. A library catalogue gives 1848. The directories give no Sands hotel on the creek before Gopsill's listing of 1871; before that, his houses were at Chestnut Hill (the Press, 1863; McElroy, 1866). The valley's history says the house rose after the Civil War. Unsettled, and printed as unsettled.
The end. The same catalogue says the hotel "was sold to the Fairmount Park Commission in 1872" and closed; the valley's history says it closed in 1887 at the park taking. Against both: the park commissioners' report for 1878 lists "Indian Rock Hotel, in the Wissahickon Park" among its seven refreshment places, and the 1884 survey of the creek names an Indian Rock hotel on the drive — without saying which of the two Indian Rocks it was. No deed or jury award for the taking has been found in free sources.
The keeper's death. The New York Clipper of 30 August 1884 records that Reuben Sands died on 20 August 1884, aged about sixty-nine. Whatever the widow did afterward belongs to the next chamber's telling, not this one's.
The people in the photograph. The Library Company's description of the stereograph names none of them: two men at the columns, a man on the ground, a woman and girl at the railing, and "an African American man in an apron on the side staircase." The search for his name runs through the 1870 census of the city's 22nd Ward, and that page of the hunt is still open.
The misfiled house. One library lantern-slide record places this hotel at Gypsy Lane and Lincoln Drive — and identifies the building there as Wissahickon Hall. Four separate chains place Sands's house here, north of the Rex Avenue bridge. The slide's record is a conflation, and it is printed here so the argument stays where the record put it.
The fountain. Erected 1854 above the hotel, the city's first public drinking fountain: John Cook gave the stonework, Charles Megargee the spring, and the stone was cut pro bono publico and esto perpetua. The hotel's sheds stood by it.
The rock. Council Rock, the ledge above the house, was the Lenape council place of valley legend. A wooden statue marked it in 1856, put up by Joseph Middleton of the turnpike company; the limestone Tedyuscung of 1902, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles W. Henry, carved by J. Massey Rhind, stands there still.

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