[Philadelphia] [Lemon Hill] (Keyser, Charles S.) Lemon Hill, in its Connection with the Efforts of our Citizens and Councils to Obtain a Public Park

Philadelphia: For Private Distribution, 1856. Limited large-paper copy edition, one of only 20 printed. 4to, 10 3/8 x 7 1/2 in. (263 x 190 mm). 30 pp. Illustrated with an engraved frontispiece portrait of Thomas P. Cope, President of the Mercantile Library Co., Philadelphia, by (John) Sartain, after J. Neagle, dated 1848. Quarter brown morocco over marbled paper-covered boards, stamped in gilt, boards and extremities rubbed, spine rubbed and chipped; all edges trimmed; frontispiece foxed.

OCLC and Sabin (37696) locate copies with an 1856 Crissy & Markley imprint, but neither cites this privately distributed version of only 20 copies. Rare Book Hub yields only one copy, from 1917, which specifically indicates it as one of only 20 copies.

Lemon Hill was the birthplace of Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, the first property purchased by the city when it began creating the large sprawling recreational grounds that hug both sides of the Schuylkill River in the city's west and northwest regions. The land was originally part of Springettsbury Manor, a large tract of woods and farmland owned by William Penn, and named after his wife, Gulielma Springett. In the 18th-century the manor was broken up into smaller parcels, and three-hundred acres of it was purchased by American financier and land speculator, William Morris, for his Hills estate. It was later confiscated by his creditors upon his bankruptcy, and in 1799 wealthy Philadelphia merchant Henry Pratt bought 43 acres of the estate for $14,000 in a sheriff's sale. Between 1799-1800 he built Lemon Hill mansion, a federal-style home that sits high above a hill overlooking the Schuylkill River. By the Panic of 1837, the most severe economic slump to hit the country at that point, the estate had declined and had passed through numerous owners. By the early 1850s the property was being used as a beer garden, and was immensely popular with the city's German population, its gardens often used for the German community's Sangerfests. In 1855 the city purchased the grounds and declared it a public park, the first in what was to become the city's largest recreational grounds, totaling over 2,000 acres. The mansion underwent major renovations in the 1860s, and again in the 1920s, and in 1955 was opened to the public as an historic house.

From the library of bibliophile and long-standing Grolier Club member David Allen Fraser (1911-2003).