Woodcrest, the Paul Family, & Staff

Read Woodcrest’s detailed entry into the National Register of Historic Places, 2008.

See Woodcrest as it stands today, on Cabrini University’s campus, Radnor, PA.

Who worked at Woodcrest? Jump down to read about William Quirk and Mary McFadden, two of the Woodcrest Estate’s domestic staff.

The 238-acre Woodcrest estate was located in Radnor Township, Pennsylvania. The Tudor Revival mansion was built 1899–1902 for James W. Paul, Jr. by Horace Trumbauer, an architect from Philadelphia who designed many of the city’s largest private residences, including those of Peter A.B. Widener and the Elkins family. His firm would later partner with Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary to design the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The eastern wing of Woodcrest mansion contained the living and working spaces of the many people who would have served the Paul family and maintained the home, grounds, and stables. On the inside of the building, there was one door that entered the eastern wing on each floor of the mansion, separating the servants’ quarters and spaces of domestic labor from the more formal rooms used by the Pauls.

Significant family events were held at Woodcrest, including both James Paul’s funeral in 1908 and the wedding of his daughter Mary Astor Paul to her first husband, Charles Munn, in 1909. Mary inherited Woodcrest, and the estate was kept in the Paul family until 1925. The mansion still stands as part of the Cabrini University campus.

Consider what the photos on this page show and what they hide. We see the splendor but not the complex human infrastructure that allowed this lifestyle to function. In materials such as correspondence, we get a glimpse into the relationship between employer and employee or worker to worker, and even the close bonds that could sometimes form over many years.

Mary Astor Paul Munn Allez spent her teen years and the early years of her first marriage at Woodcrest. In a condolence letter from Mary to Mrs. [Elizabeth] Quirk from 1921, Mary expressed her grief over William Quirk’s death, a man employed by her family at their estate for many years. She writes, “It is a link of my childhood happiness gone and what Woodcrest will be without him...Pauline and Charlie [her children] are with me here and they both feel the news very deeply....”

William Quirk (1858–1921) is the liveried driver shown in the above photograph. According to the 1910 census records, years earlier, Quirk was listed as a coachman for a private family—Anthony Drexel Paul and Isabel Biddle Paul. Quirk emigrated from Ireland in 1862 and was a naturalized citizen. His wife, Elizabeth, was also Irish and had no listed employment outside of the home. The Quirks had three living sons: John, Joseph, and William. As of that census interview, John was employed as a plumber and Joseph was a bookkeeper; neither was in service.

Mary McFadden (1880–?), the writer of the second letter below, worked in service for a time for the Paul family. From census records we can see that she worked as a laundress in 1910 and a cook in 1920. She emigrated from Ireland in 1898. From the geographic origins of her condolence letter, we can deduce that as of 1921, McFadden was still working for the Paul family and was with them while abroad.