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Bryn Mawr Hotel, ca. 1906 The number of station stops between Philadelphia and the village of Paoli was also increased from seven to 17, giving rise to the schoolgirl’s mnemonic device above as a means for remembering the order of stops between the city and Bryn Mawr: Overbrook, Merion, Narberth, Wynnewood, Ardmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr. The moppet brigade similarly bowdlerized the remaining 10 stations—Rosemont, Villanova, Radnor, St. David’s, Wayne, Strafford, Devon, Berwyn, Daylesford, and Paoli—with a memory device that defeated its purpose by being impossible to remember. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s campaign to promote the Main Line as an elite and salubrious summer resort was less than a complete triumph. The area could boast of few traditional resort attractions beyond fresh air. No mountain lakes, mineral springs, nor cool ocean breezes graced the old Welsh Tract, and even the most obtuse of tourists was not unaware that the very railroad that brought him to Bryn Mawr or Devon could just as easily have transported him to the Poconos or the New Jersey shore. In 1890, after the Keystone Hotel burned to the ground, the railroad commissioned Frank Furness to build the grand Bryn Mawr Hotel. A mere six years later, the building was being leased to a girl’s boarding school. Real estate development took a more opportune course. Aided in no small part by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s insistence that its officers and board of directors show their support for the venture, the region was rife with the country houses of assorted railroad vice presidents, business managers, and passenger and freight agents by the mid-1870s. Companies doing large amounts of business with the Railroad quickly followed. Burnham, Williams & Company, parent of Baldwin Locomotive, purchased some 500 acres south of Rosemont station; coal dealers Charles Berwind and Israel Morris obtained large tracts in Wynnewood and Villanova; iron founder Charles Wheeler completed one of Bryn Mawr’s first country houses, Pembroke, in 1869. Manufacturers of gauges and meters, rail car and tender builders, lawyers, bankers, and financiers, all with some connection to the Pennsylvania Railroad, bought farms and built houses along the route of the Main Line.
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