Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: October 1990 Volume 28 Number 4, Pages 149–154

Boyle Irwin : A Memoir

Janet Irwin Malin

Page 149

My father, Boyle Irwin, was born April 7, 1887 at 70 North 34th street in Philadelphia, the youngest son of Boyle Irwin and Annie Hallowell Irwin.

He was descended on his mother's side from English, Welsh, and German stock, and on his father's side from the Scotch-Irish who emigrated from Scotland and Ireland to this country in the 18th century. (He traced his ancestors in Scotland back to about 1850.)

After coming to America his ancestors settled in western Pennsylvania and took part in the French and Indian War and the Revolution. His immediate great-great grandfather, John Irwin, was wounded at the Battle of the Clouds and was, along with two others of his forebearers, an original member of the Society of the Cincinnati. There is a town, Irwin, near Pittsburgh, named for the family.

One of the members of this family, incidentally, married an ancestor of Henry Laughlin, of Jones & Laughlin Steel, and the name Irwin was added to the Laughlin clan: some members of the Laughlin family still have the middle name of Irwin. A son of Henry Laughlin became ambassador to Spain in about 1919, and served in other diplomatic posts as well. A sister, Anne, lived in Chestnut Hill in an enormous grey stone house with extensive grounds; it is now occupied by an order of Catholic nuns. A brother, Ledlie Irwin Laughlin, was an ardent collector of early American pewter, and wrote a book on the subject. All these cousins, and numerous others, are now dead. (My grandfather was one of eight children, so there were numerous relations.)

Page 150

My grandmother's family, the Hallowells, were of old Philadelphia society, and had made their mark in Philadelphia as steel manufacturers, carriage makers, and in other businesses, and made substantial contributions to the growth of the city.

My father lived with his parents and a cousin, Emily Hickey. He went at first to a neighborhood school, and then to Central Manual Training School at Broad and Wood streets in Philadelphia, graduating at the age of 17 in 1904.

While at school he became much interested in physical fitness and took gymnasium classes as he continued to keep his body in good physical condition. He played a good game of tennis, swam exceptionally well, and skated and sledded in the winter. He loved to walk and had a particularly graceful stride; he would walk miles, never seeminq to qet tired, and expected companions to keep up with him no matter how difficult the path! At this time he was eligible for induction into the First City Troop of Philadelphia, but was rejected because of a hearing deficiency.

After graduation he secured a job at the old Penncoyd Iron Works along the Schuylkill River near Manayunk, at the handsome salary of $4.00 per week. Out of this he gave his mother $2.50 for room and board, using the remaining $1.50 for carfare etc. as he commuted to and from work either by street car or bicycle.

With help from his uncle Eli Hallowell, who assisted him with the tuition, he also began taking classes in the evening school of Drexel Institute, as it was then called, taking courses in civil engineering, architectural engineering, and land surveying, along with various mathematics courses pertaining to these studies. Since the land surveying classes were taught on Saturday afternoons, he had to hurry home from Penncoyd to attend these classes. Upon graduation from Drexel, his father bought him his first surveying instrument, a transit.

Through the husband of a cousin, Frederick Cadmus of Pottstown, he was then employed by The American Bridge Company and was sent to different locations to work. One of these places was Austin, Pa.; he arrived just at the time of a terrible flood, and he often told of the devastation from the raging waters. He also worked for a time in Detroit, during the winter months, and would often reminisce about the terrible winds from the lake which sometimes actually blew people off their feet. (One time he and a co-worker were turning a corner when a young lady was swept towards them, frantically trying to keep her feet and held on to her hat, and was luckily rescued by the two gentlemen and helped to a sheltered spot.)

When he was offered a job in Winnipeg, Canada, and told his father of the offer, his father sent him a ticket home! At that time his father was manager of the Philadelphia Division of the Pullman Company, a separate company at that time. After this he was sent to Buffalo, and later to Binghamton, N. Y.

Page 151

While at Central Manual Training School he met Ernest Turner. He kept up the friendship while they were at Drexel, where Turner was taking courses in electrical engineering, and in the course of time met Ernest's sister, Mable Turner. In June of 1912 they were married and went to Binghamton to live. Near the end of that year they returned to Philadelphia and lived with his parents for several weeks before renting a house in Germantown, where I was born in 1913.

He then secured employment at the Cramps Shipyard, and later was transferred to a location near Kennett Square and moved there in 1914. They stayed there until late 1915, when they came back and settled in Narberth where my brother was born in April 1916.

Unable to enter the Army Engineers Corps because he was married and had a family, during World War I he continued to work for Cramps in war work at League Island. During these years he took additional courses at Drexel in higher mathematics and elevation design.

Near the end of the First World War, he and my mother purchased a property at Diamond Rock from a Mrs. Alice Kulp, and moved there on the 4th of November 1918. In the following years he worked in Philadelphia, commuting from Paoli, driving to and from the station in a horse and wagon. During the day the horse boarded at Eachus' livery stable in Paoli.

He worked for various firms, one of which was Ballinger and Perot, a leading architectural firm at that time. However, following the war, architectural employment was not very steady, and he started doing small surveying jobs. Several of them were for the Phoenix Iron Company, which owned quite a bit of land on the North Valley Hills and at Diamond Rock. The lands were scattered through the woods, and had been purchased with the idea of mining ore from them for the mills in Phoenixville. None of them was very productive, however, and so the company wanted them surveyed, and their boundaries established, with an expectation of future sales of the land. He had also become acquainted with Howard Okie, and did various surveys of coal lands near Pottsville owned by the Okie family. From the very first years of living at Diamond Rock, he was also very friendly with Richard Haughton, owner of the Great Valley Mill property, and did some preliminary studies for St. Peter's in the Great Valley to determine how to expand its facilities to take care of the increases in its membership.

Not long afterwards, he was called back to work with Ballinger and Perot in Philadelphia, although he often worked for other architectural firms on sort of a loan basis. He worked on designing the foundations of the Delaware River Bridge (now the Benjamin Franklin Bridge), and the foundations of the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall in Atlantic City."

During these years he perfected a set of calculations to determine the wind stress factor on the framework of tall buildings. After they were published he received royalties for this work, and my mother, even after his death in 1945, for a time continued to receive them as copies were purchased. It wasn't a very big thing and the amounts were small, but my father felt he had accomplished something "worthwhile."

Page 152

From Boyle Irwin's notebook

Page 153

During the lean years after the First World War he worked at anything that would bring in an honest dollar. He worked for a time at the Great Valley Mills, and for Utley Wedge, and for various farmers at harvest time. He always stressed that no work was too menial if the money was earned honestly.

He loved to garden, and each year planted a huge vegetable garden. It always yielded far more than we could use, so he sold the surplus. He also kept chickens and sold the eggs in Philadelphia at the office where he worked. He kept bees and sold the honey we couldn't use. He planted a large orchard of more than 400 fruit trees - apples, peaches, cherries, pears, plums - and raised small fruits such as red and black currants, raspberries and gooseberries, asparagus and strawberries. He also tried keeping pigs, but that venture he abandoned after two years as unprofitable. Later, in the 1930s, we kept a cow and had the benefit of her milk and butter. My father also kept sheep to keep down the grass and weeds in the orchard.

My mother, a city-reared girl who had never done much more than prepare and cook a few fancy dishes to impress visitors, learned to make bread, can vegetables and fruits, and make jams and jellies -- all on a wood-fired cookstove. She also helped with the chickens and gathered eggs.

During the years of about 1923 and 1924 my father was employed by the Zimmerman firm in Philadelphia, who designed the Conowingo Dam at Peach Bottom. He and my mother went to the opening ceremonies, and walked across the top of the dam.

He was also affiliated with Arlington Supplee in Paoli in the development of the Biddle tract on Central Avenue, and designed various houses in the tract and the surrounding area. He also designed the English-style structure on Lancaster Avenue in Paoli for Clarence Supplee's hardware store and the other shops in the same building, and a garage for Eric Ottey where Paoli West is now located. Among other houses he designed were three houses at the junction of Old Lancaster Road and Devon State Road for Guy Wheeler; a lovely stone house for a Mrs. Axel Rossell on Waterloo Road near Sugartown Road; and an office and residence for Dr. Chapin Carpenter, an occulist near the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne.

In between doing new houses he also drew plans to restore old houses in the area, notably Stirling's Quarters in Valley Forge for the Robert C. Liggets. (This was one of the most satisfying of his restorations.) He particularly loved old houses, and liked the challenge that was required to bring them back to their original condition. His drawings were so precise, and the elevations he drew so life-like, that whoever employed him felt they could walk right in. He made these people visualize just what they were going to have as the finished house.

In 1924 he and my mother had purchased a farm at Pughtown, and employed several farmers to work the land on shares. After my brother and I were married, in 1936 and 1939, they sold the house and land at Diamond Rock and began restoring the house at Pughtown which had been built in 1796. My parents lived there until my father's death in 1945. In 1946 my mother sold the house and farmland to Samuel Morris, who still lives there.

Page 154

At different times my father was employed by United Engineers in Philadelphia, and traveled to various places to oversee the construction of buildings - a state building in Harrisburg, school buildings in Altoona, and so forth.

At the beginning of the Second World War he was employed (I think also by United Engineers) to work on stress factors for the testing of the atomic bomb. We did not know of this until several years after his death, when my mother was told by one of the executives of the firm how much he was trusted not to leak any such "top secret" information.

During 1944 and 1945 he was also employed by United Engineers to work at Warner Lime Company at Cedar Hollow, also war work. In early 1945 he became too ill to work at the office, but continued to work at home and was paid up until his death on September 16 that year.

He was much interested in genealogy, and enjoyed tracing back the various branches of his family, as his great-grandmother Eliza McCully Irwin had thirteen children and his grandfather eight children on the Irwin side alone. He was also related, through his uncle Eli Hallowell, to the Baugh family, and to the D. Hayes Agnew Adams family in Paoli.

He was a registered professional architectural engineer, civil engineer, and land surveyor, licensed by the state of Pennsylvania. He was a member of the American Society of Professional Engineers, and in 1939 was made a fellow of the Society at a ceremony at the Engineers Club in Philadelphia. (He was a modest man and would not have attended the ceremony or even mentioned it had not a very good friend contacted my mother and arranged to have both my parents attend. My mother often expressed her pride in him, and felt that this occasion capped what she felt was a notable career.)

He loved everything about nature ~ to see the leaves change color in the fall, to hear birds sing, to watch seeds breaking through the ground in spring, to come upon a ripe peach or other fruit. As the seasons changed even snow and ice seemed beautiful to him.

Designing a stone house or renovating an old one was a joy. As he said, man could contrive many things, but only God could make stones.

At his funeral, the minister who preached the sermon said in his eulogy, "A man who loved stones, hills, trees and everything about nature will not be a stranger in heaven."