Description: It is believed that Lucy Sampson captured this image about 1903, though the postcard itself is dated May 5, 1906. Sampson had set her tripod and camera on Cassatt Avenue facing north from the north end of the PRR bridge and one-half block north of the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike, immediately west of the Berwyn station (on the right, one sees the bannisters for the stairs leading down to the westbound platform). From L to R, the first agricultural field, part of the Fritz farm which occupied most of the land west to Howellville Road, would be the Berwyn Theatre, built in 1914, and is, in 2014, the Cassatt Crossing corporate center. Additional plowed fields are today tree-lined residential neighborhoods. On the east side of Cassatt Avenue one can clearly see the bell tower and steeple of the Baptist Chapel and the house beyond the Baptist Chapel, the first thing that is constructed on Cassatt Avenue. And at the end of the Avenue, where Cassatt intersects with Conestoga Road, stands a palatial mansion called “Hilltop,” owned by Oliver Bair, a successful undertaker in Philadelphia. From “Hilltop” one could look south onto Berwyn, and north into the Great Valley. One other interesting footnote: in the foreground is a post with a kerosene lamp (there were no gas lines in Berwyn in the very early 1900’s, and the village lamplighter, a man named William Nuzum, lived in an apartment in the Town Hall just south of Trinity Presbyterian Church.- Herb Fry and Roger Thorne
