Valley Green Inn — Wissahickon Valley Park

Valley Green Inn at dusk in its working years: a stone inn with a long porch, lamplight in the windows, mist on the creek below — The house in its working years. Hold the plate, and the years fall away.

The house stands at the bottom of its own road, where the drive gives out at the creek, and it has stood there since about 1850 — though three accounts of who built it survive, and they do not agree, and the paper that would settle it lies in an archive across the river of years. What is certain is the succession of keepers the directories kept: Rinkers in the fifties, Simon Markley by 1860, John Hentz's name painted on the porch by 1893.

It was no innocent house. In 1884 the city's survey of the creek named four hotels as the worst pollution on the water — ahead of every ruined mill — and Valley Green was one of them, its wash and waste running straight into the Wissahickon. The surveyors wrote it down in columns, the way men write down weather.

By the century's end the house was tired, and the verdict went out against it — dilapidated: raze it, and build anew. The demolition of Valley Green was the reasonable opinion of 1899.

The house declined to be demolished. Money was raised by subscription; the keeping of it passed to a committee of Chestnut Hill women — or so the valley's histories tell it; the repairs, at least, are real, and were made again in 1937. The other six houses on this creek are gone, or shut, or reduced to stones in the grass. This one is open. If you walk down the drive tomorrow it will serve you dinner — the same dinner, catfish and waffles, that it served when the carriages came.

Of the seven, it is the only house still breathing. Knock gently. It is not accustomed to being the ghost.

The long porch of Valley Green Inn, a painted sign naming the keeper, rockers in the candlelight — The porch, with the keeper's name upon the sign — as the guidebooks printed it in 1893.

The Cellar — What the Record Holds

The likenesses in this house are drawn, as the spirit photographers drew theirs. The words are from the record, and the record is this:

The purchase. The park's Fourth Annual Report (1871) counts 37.1 acres of "Wissahickon Territory" paid from the Park Loan — but names no parcel. One library record says the city bought this ground in 1872; the valley's own historians say 1873. The deed copies rest in the park archive. Unsettled, and printed as unsettled.
The builder. Daly (1922): the present building erected 1850, Abraham Rinker first landlord. The valley tradition: Edward Rinker leased from Thomas Livezey and built it himself. A third account gives Edward the building in 1852. No deed or lease naming the builder has been read. Three versions, kept separate.
The keepers. McElroy's directories: E. R. Rinker, hotel, Wissahickon, 1856–57; Abram Rinker, 1858; Simon S. Markley, 1860. Gopsill: John Hentz at this house, 1887 — and the porch sign in Woodward's Philadelphia and its Environs (1893, p. 205) names him still.
The indictment. The 1884 survey of the creek (Barber): of the four hotels on the drive, Valley Green drained its wash and waste into the creek, with privy drainage besides.
The reprieve. A park scrapbook clipping of about 1899: Jesse T. Vogdes recommended razing the "dilapidated" Valley Green Hotel and replacing it. The house was repaired instead — and in 1937, again.
The elopement. A later tradition tells that a Rinker ran off and his wife kept the house with his brother. No newspaper or court record of it has been found. Told, but not proven — the parlour does not swear to it.

Back Home