The Lotus Inn — Wissahickon Valley Park

The Lotus Inn at dusk, drawn from its one surviving photograph: a two-story inn with a mansard roof, a full balcony and an arched veranda, the long carriage shed to its right, lamplight in the windows — The Lotus Inn, drawn from the one photograph of it that survives. The card crops the house at its left edge; the plate completes the building along its own lines.

One photograph of this house survives, and it was never in any archive. The keeper of this ground had it all along — a card-mounted print, gone soft at the edges: the inn in winter, two stories of board siding under a mansard roof, a balcony running the full width, an arched veranda below, and to the right a long open carriage shed with a wall of stone at its end. The parlour searched the Library Company's cabinets for this house and found only its bridge. The house was here, in the keeper's hands, the whole time.

They say it was built in the 1880s out of another building's bones — timbers salvaged from the demolished Megargee Mills, carried to where the drive meets Rittenhouse Street, just outside the park's first boundaries. Outside the line, the park's liquor laws did not reach it. The Crawford stage ran past its door; horsemen and winter sleigh parties stopped for the house dinner, catfish and waffles.

The directories keep its keepers the way they keep everyone, a line a year: Frederick Miley in 1887; then Charles Mehler — junior in 1899, the "junior" gone by 1904, whether dropped or a different man the page does not say. In 1896 and '97 the city built a stone bridge over the creek for the traffic of this crossing, and the bridge took the inn's name.

One evening survives entire. A man named Bart Haley, whom the newspapers called the Soothsayer, remembered it for Christopher Morley years afterward: a chartered hansom out from the city, a seat on a honeysuckled balcony over the creek, and chicken and waffles "served with the proper flourish by a colored servitor named Pompey." That is all of Pompey the record kept — a name, a flourish, another man's memory of being served well. He would have been working the Mehler years, about 1908 to 1910. No census-taker's line for him has been found. Yet.

By 1911 the directories have dropped the house. In 1920 Morley walked the drive and wrote the shortest obituary any inn on this creek received: "Only a few paces on was the abandoned foundation of the Lotus Inn." Whether the park's 1916 expansion took it, and what was paid, and to whom — the parlour has looked, and the paper is not there. And why Lotus? Nobody wrote that down either.

But the photograph has a tell, and the keeper read it years ago: the shed. A section of its stone wall stands beside the trail to this day, in the woods at the bend of the drive — and in our own time the keeper took the old print and drew the house back into a photograph of the trail as it stands, the inn risen where the wall still stands. The séance does the same work by older rules. The house is not lost. It is here, in its picture, in its wall, and in its name — which the bridge below still carries over the creek.

The Lotus Inn Bridge at dusk, drawn from its lantern slide of about 1895: a stone arch over the creek, one small lamp burning at the far end — The bridge that carries the inn's name — drawn from its lantern slide of about 1895.

The Cellar — What the Record Holds

About the likenesses in this house: the inn above is drawn from the one surviving photograph of it — a card-mounted print kept by the keeper of this ground and shown on his old page. The photograph crops the house at its left edge; the plate completes the building along its own lines, and says so. The bridge is drawn from its own lantern slide. No other likeness of the inn is known to the parlour, and the words are from the record, and the record is this:

The keepers. Gopsill's Hotels, 1887 (p. 261): "Lotus Inn, Frederick Miley, Rittenhouse c Wissahickon drive, Roxb." Gopsill 1899 and Boyd 1900: Charles Mehler Jr.; Boyd 1904 and 1907: Charles Mehler. Five address forms appear across the years and are kept as printed. No Lotus Inn appears in Boyd's co-partnership lists for 1911 — the house was probably gone as a business by then.
The one evening. Christopher Morley, Travels in Philadelphia (1920), p. 106 — Bart Haley's recollection, not Morley's own, of a night "ten years ago," which places it about 1908–10. P. 230 gives the foundation line quoted in the story.
The frame of the house. Built in the 1880s from Megargee Mills materials; the honeysuckle balcony; the stage line; the liquor boundary — all of it rests on one modern synthesis (Friends of the Wissahickon) and is printed here as probable, not proven. Morley's balcony agrees with it; the photograph's balcony agrees with both.
The bridge that disagrees with itself. The Library Company's records do not settle their own story: one says the Lotus Inn Bridge of 1896–97 was replaced by the Blue Stone Bridge in 1920; another calls the Blue Stone Bridge itself "also known as the Lotus Inn Bridge," built 1896–97. One bridge with two names, or two bridges — unreconciled, and printed so.
The taking. No free source holds the Fairmount Park Commission's 1916 report; the owner of record and the price paid are unknown. A keeper is not a landowner, and this chamber does not let the Mehlers' names stand in for either.
The wall. The keeper's own reading of the photograph: the carriage shed at the right is the tell, and a section of stone wall answering to it still stands beside the trail at the Rittenhouse bend. His guess at the site agrees with the directories' corner — Rittenhouse at the drive.
Pompey. One source only. The census and directory hunt for a Black waiter of that name in Roxborough or Manayunk, 1880–1910, is open — it is the parlour's own errand, and it is not finished.

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