About Gladwyne

Gladwyne is a singular place.  Nowhere else on the Main Line can one be so close to—yet feel so far from—the City.

At Gladwyne’s center is the village—one of the last remaining colonial crossroad communities. Its 18th and 19th Century buildings, still showing similar structures, styles, and scales after several centuries, offer a rare glimpse of a bygone era. Directly below the village is Mill Creek, where the riverbank ruins of colonial mills still stand. The village district and creek district are both on the National Register of Historic Places.

The surrounding area is residential, with private homes nestled among rolling hills, dense woods, open fields, private trails, public parks, and twisting tributaries of Mill Creek and the Schuylkill River. It is even home to the township’s only remaining riverfront residences. Anachronisms such as cars fording streams and horses crossing streets are not uncommon.

Residents enjoy easy access to the City to the East, the Mall to the West, and the commercial corridors of Lancaster and City Avenues. But they can meet most of their needs in the village; its two tiny blocks boast businesses and amenities like a grocery store, market, coffee shop, pharmacy, bank, library, gas station, post office, dry cleaner, hardware store, veterinary hospital, salon, pet groomer, yoga studio, art gallery, interior designer, and smart-home technology provider. The postmaster and shopkeepers pride themselves on providing first-rate service to, and being on a first-name basis with, their customers.  

About its History

Gladwyne’s story begins with the Lenni Lenape, who established a sophisticated society along the banks of the resource-rich Schuylkill River.  They farmed, fished, foraged, and hunted in Gladwyne on land that would come to be called the “Indian Fields.” The nearby riverbend—now home to an award-winning environmental education center—was especially prized for a warm-water pool in which fish could be trapped. 

Those natural resources also attracted settlers, who survived by digging small shelters into Gladwyne’s riverbanks before building wood or stone cabins.  They eventually built the township’s oldest home, mill, and village, which was then called Merion Square. Gladwyne’s grist mills, paper mills, and powder mills propelled the country’s early economy; one of its farms became a camp for Union soldiers who were returning from the Civil War; and one of its lakes inspired a world-famous painting.   

As residents prospered and railroads expanded, farms and mills gave way to country estates and manors in a wealth of architectural styles.  Some of those—like the Spanish Revival La Ronda and Colonial Revival Rolling Hill Farm—did not survive.  But others were preserved as homes or adaptive reuses, including the French Gothic Woodmont, Gothic Revival Skylands, Queen Ann Idlewild Farm, Colonial Revival Waverly Heights and Rocky Crest, and French Norman Cedar Crest. 

Gladwyne’s unrivaled open space—more by far than anywhere else in the township—is a testament to the prudent preservation and careful conservation of its early civic leaders. Indeed, the “Gladwyne Plan of 1951” inspired much of the township’s policy for parks, playgrounds, planning, and preservation in general.