William Hamilton and The Woodlands: A Construction of Refinement in Philadelphia

The large, porticoed house standing in Philadelphia's Woodlands Cemetery is one of the few tangible remnants of William Hamilton's significant, but not entirely comprehended, contributions to the city's colonial and postrevolutionary social atmosphere. As a man with a substantial personal fortune, Hamilton did as he pleased and in time crafted a unique life within acceptable social bounds. Ultimately, this life left few traces of traditional male success—political office, lucrative business ventures, and being head of a family dynasty—and he essentially wrote himself out of many types of modern history. Both William Hamilton and The Woodlands are compelling topics and they have been individually introduced or alluded to by scholars, but it is a shared and outwardly unified identity that conveys their singular value. William Birch's description in The Country Seats of the United States of North America (1808) was one of a number that not only offered a flattering picture of the owner and his constructed landscape, but more importantly also represented them as indivisible components of an overall experience, noting "The beauties of nature and the rarities of art, not more than the hospitality of the owner, attract to it many visitors ... and do credit to Mr. Wm. Hamilton, as a man of refined taste."1 The Woodlands was not just another of the Philadelphia area's many elegant seats. Having no dedicated profession or progeny, its creation, maintenance, and use became William Hamilton's lifelong vocation (fig. 1).	1
Fig. 1. Engraving of the mansion-house and lawn from the southeast at The Woodlands, Philadelphia, PA. William Strickland after William Birch, ca. 1809, reprinted 1830. Society Print Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
In a period when most Americans had neither the income nor the inclination to pursue an almost wholly leisured existence, Hamilton spent four decades and enormous amounts of resources in creating and modifying his Schuylkill River tract. Like the numerous suburban estates encircling Philadelphia, The Woodlands both represented and declared status; however, unlike the men building the others, Hamilton did not project this status toward the additional outcomes of augmenting political clout, attracting business partners, or increasing possibilities for a successful alliance through marriage.2 Throughout his adult life, The Woodlands remained first and foremost a complicated aesthetic, intellectual, and social exercise, and the location where Hamilton merged personal interests and inclinations with broader trends related to refinement. In doing so, his life approximated the rarified country life common to England, though interpreted by a person raised, invested, and seemingly contented in America.3 "Every Hour that I exist I find myself more attached to America," he wrote from London late in 1784, "& more fully persuaded that I cannot be so happy any where as with my friends there."4	. . .