Susan K. Mowrer

She Witnessed the Transformation of Narberth

Susan Kilpatrick Thomas was the granddaughter of William Thomas (1786–1873), who sold the Pennsylvania Railroad the right-of-way for their tracks in this vicinity, as well as the land for a train station, reportedly on the condition it bear the name "Elm Station" to recall his native Wales. Susan was born and grew up on the Thomas farm, which had been purchased from Price descendant Stephen Paschall before 1850 and passed to her father Lewis after her grandfather's death.

Over her 74 years, Susan witnessed the transformation of the Narberth area from farmland to suburb, as few others could have. When she was 8 (1876), her father leased the family farm south of the tracks to the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry, and she saw the erection of the gigantic Grangers Centennial Encampment. What eight-year-old would not have visited the encampment many times during the summer it was open, mixing with visitors from across the country and around the world? And surely she witnessed the conflagration that engulfed it that November.

Certainly she must have been acquainted with neighbor Edward Price, and watched the Belfield and Richards mansions rise on Price land in the early 1880s. The year after Price's 1887 death, she was there during the demolition of the ancestral Price farmstead, the laying of streets and the construction of houses in Narberth Park, north of the tracks.

When her father sold the Encampment acreage in 1888, she was 20, and houses started to go up there, south of the tracks, the following year. In 1891, Susan married local carpenter John Mowrer at St. John's Episcopal Church, Bala Cynwyd, and they moved into the Thomas homestead on its remaining acreage north of the tracks.

Susan and John were two of the grantors for the 1912 sale of the last acres of her grandfather's farm to Charles J. McIlvain, Jr. McIlvain & Company immediately mapped out the development of "Anthwyn Farms", which was essentially built out within 20-some years, during Susan's lifetime.

Likewise, from the 1803 Price house which she purchased in 1911, Susan experienced the meteoric growth of Narberth, from a handful of homes with maybe 100 inhabitants to a thriving borough of 1,300 homes and population over 5,000 in the course of forty years. During its peak growth, dozens of houses might be under construction on any given day.

She lived the rest of her life in the Price house, in which she died in 1942, 1200 feet from where she born.

"Mrs. Mowrer Dies", Our Town December 10, 1942, page 1.

Updated December 14, 2024.