The Catharine Yeates Cottage on Cabbage Hill

Jim Gerhart, April 2020

There’s a good chance you have walked or driven by the three-unit apartment house at 613 Fremont Street without thinking twice about it. It’s really not much more remarkable than other nearby houses, except that the lot is larger than most and there is a privacy fence around it. But the house has a long remarkable history. In fact, it was the first house built in the central part of Cabbage Hill.

The two-story, frame house with a gambrel roof, now clad with modern siding, was built in 1838 as the summer cottage of Miss Catharine “Kitty” Yeates. The house has had many owners and tenants over the last 180 years. I will briefly trace its history here, with closer looks at two of its most interesting owners—Miss Yeates, a wealthy philanthropist, and Alexander J. Gerz, a Civil War veteran and entrepreneur.

The house’s first owner, Catharine Yeates (1783-1866), was the daughter of Jasper Yeates, a famous Lancaster lawyer and State Supreme Court Justice. Starting in 1820, after she had inherited part of her father’s considerable estate, Catharine bought several tracts of land in what is today the heart of Cabbage Hill. Her property totaled almost ten acres and, in terms of today’s streets, was centered on the 500 blocks, and part of the 600 blocks, of St. Joseph, Poplar, and Fremont.

In 1838, Catharine built her summer cottage (now 613 Fremont) on the southernmost corner of her property. At that time, there were no other houses in the area, and there were no streets, only tree-lined dirt paths separating fenced pastures. A stream starting near Manor Street and ending at South Water Street, ran in front of her house. The setting was perfect for what she wanted—a cool place where she could escape from her family’s mansion on South Queen Street near the square when the summer heat and city life got too oppressive.

Catharine, who never married, lived in her cottage during the summers for the next fifteen years. She sometimes rented out rooms on the second floor to various tenants. The property required maintenance, and she had a caretaker to tend to the lawn and flower beds, the fruit trees and grapevines, and the fenced pastures where her horses and cattle were kept. The stream in front of her house, which flowed where New Dorwart is today, supplied her house, livestock, and chickens with water.

In 1855, Catharine deeded the cottage and all of its surrounding acreage to her nephew Jasper Yeates Conyngham. Catharine died in 1866, and in her obituary in a Lancaster newspaper, she was praised as “…one of the most estimable ladies that ever resided in the city…” Perhaps her most consequential act of philanthropy was the founding and endowment of the Yeates Institute, a private school in Lancaster intended to prepare students for the Episcopal ministry.

Catharine’s nephew Conyngham did not live in the cottage, renting it out instead. In 1869, he sold the house and its property to David Hartman, who was a city tax collector and wealthy real-estate investor. Hartman later was elected county sheriff. He bought the Yeates property as an investment for $5,500, and sold it the following year to Alexander J. Gerz for $7,000.

Gerz (1826-1876) was an immigrant from Lorraine, near the border of France and Germany, who was part of a successful family pottery business in Lancaster. He enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War, serving in the 79th Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers. Shortly after returning from the war to Lancaster, he moved with his wife to Mexico, where he enjoyed success in the pottery business there. He was forced to leave Mexico during a revolution, and enroute back to Lancaster, his wife died of yellow fever in New Orleans. Back in Lancaster, he resumed his pottery business, ran the Eagle Hotel on North Queen, remarried, and had four children.

In 1870, Gerz bought the former Yeates property, where he opened a hotel and saloon in the summer cottage, calling it the Green Cottage Hotel. He held events on the property, including dance parties and reunions for his fellow Civil War veterans. The one-acre lawn around the hotel and saloon consisted of well-kept grass, flower gardens, and fruit and shade trees. Next to the hotel on the northwest side was a large pond stocked with a wide variety of fish. (The site of the pond was an abandoned, short-lived quarry that Gerz had dug when he discovered marble under his property in 1870.) Also on the grounds were a small deer park and a large wooden platform (thirty-two feet square) for dancing. The grounds could be accessed by a bridge over the stream that ran in front of the hotel.

Gerz died at the age of fifty in 1876. His widow, Margaret, sold his remaining property, including the cottage, at auction in November 1878. Henry Haverstick bought the cottage property for $2,100. For the sale, the lot on which the cottage was located was reduced in size to 200 feet square, bordering on New Dorwart and Fremont.

In 1884, Haverstick sold the property to John Snyder, who was a hotel proprietor and tobacco merchant. The Snyder family would own the property and live there for the next forty-five years, with son Michael Snyder taking over ownership when his father died in 1930. John Snyder built a tobacco warehouse on the opposite corner of the lot from the cottage, at the intersection of Poplar and New Dorwart.

A year after John Snyder’s death, his son Michael sold the property to Harry M. Stumpf. Stumpf was a building contractor and Michael Snyder’s cousin. He built garages on the property between the cottage and Poplar, and ran his contracting business from there. He converted the cottage into two apartments and rented them out. The Stumpf family was prominent on the Hill and in Lancaster for many years. Harry’s father, John, owned a hotel in the 400 block of Manor Street, and Harry’s brother, Edward, owned a service station and garage in the 500 block of Fremont, and also was the owner of Stumpf Field along the Fruitville Pike.

In 1952, Harry Stumpf sold the lot with the cottage to Samuel Lombardo for $15,000. Lombardo and his wife Elsie got divorced in 1956. Elsie got the cottage, remarried to Maurice Brady, and lived in the cottage until her death in 1991. Elsie and Maurice added a third apartment to the house, living in the main apartment themselves and renting out the other two. The house remains divided into three apartments to this day.

To be sure, Miss Yeates’ 1838 summer cottage has changed a lot over the years. It no longer sits all by itself in the middle of pasture land. It doesn’t have a stream in its front yard. It has been added to and modified numerous times. But the basic structure of the cottage is still intact. The next time you pass the house at 613 Fremont, try to visualize it as it was 150 years ago, when it was a hotel and saloon surrounded by well-kept grounds that were home to a fish pond and a deer park. It’s just one more example of all the history hiding just below the surface on Cabbage Hill.

SoWe COVID-19 Update

Hello Neighbors,

SoWe is closely monitoring the COVID-19 outbreak and reviewing best practices. To ensure everyone’s health and safety and to do our part to encourage social distancing, all SoWe Committee and board meetings will be cancelled for the month of March. The SoWe Office at 417 Poplar St. and the LHOP main office at 123 E. King St. are closed to at this time.

New information about the outbreak is occurring in real time and we are following updates as they become available.  I encourage everyone to follow PA Department of Health  and the CDC’s recommendations. SoWe and LHOP staff continue to work remotely to make sure clients have the resources they need to continue to thrive. Please remember that this is a difficult time for our most vulnerable neighbors. Please take this opportunity to check in with each other especially our elderly neighbors; please make sure you follow proper health recommendations while doing so.

Thank you for your understanding and cooperation during this time. Please feel free to reach out SoWe staff at (717)455-3626 or info@sowelancaster.org.

Stay safe and stay healthy,

Jake Thorsen

SoWe Neighborhood Director

The Rise and Fall of Cabbage Hill’s Movie Theater

Jim Gerhart, March 2020

Movies, or moving pictures as they were first known, were invented in the 1890s. Within ten years, theaters devoted to showing movies began to proliferate. The first four large movie theaters in Lancaster were built between 1911 and 1914. They were the Colonial, Hippodrome, and Grand on North Queen Street, and the Kuhn on Manor Street. The three downtown theaters were more opulent and charged higher prices than the Kuhn, which was established to serve the working-class southwest Lancaster neighborhood.

The Kuhn Theatre, also sometimes known as Kuhn’s Theatre, opened in March 1911. Adam Kuhn was a German immigrant who attended St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, and who for many years, ran a successful bakery on East Chestnut Street. After much of his bakery was destroyed in a fire, he decided to retire from the baking business and venture into the new movie-theater business. He sold the damaged bakery in September 1910 and a month later he used the proceeds to buy a large lot in the 600 block of Manor Street for $1,950 (the lot was actually purchased in the name of Mary, his wife). On that lot, Kuhn built the Kuhn Theatre, which would eventually become the Strand Theatre and continue showing movies until 1962.

The Kuhn was located at 605-609 Manor on a large lot that extended to Reiker Avenue, and it stood nearly alone on that part of the block when it was first built. The brick theater had 40 feet of frontage on Manor, widening to 70 feet where the screen and stage were at the rear of the building. The building was 205 feet long, with a two-and-a-half-story brick house attached to the rear of the theater, in which the Kuhn family lived. The original theater, which could seat 400 people, was heated by steam and had both gas and electric lights. (The former site of the now demolished theater is a parking lot next to B&M Sunshine Laundry.)

Adam Kuhn’s new career in the movie-theater business did not last very long. He died in the fall of 1912. Edward J. Kuhn, Adam’s son, took over ownership of the theater. Like most movie theaters in the early days, it not only offered movies, but also offered other types of entertainment such as vaudeville acts and band music. Kuhn also rented out the theater for use by others; one example was the Salvation Army for evangelistic services in 1914.

The movies shown at the Kuhn were quite primitive, black-and-white, silent movies that featured exaggerated acting and were usually about 15-45 minutes long. Each movie consisted of one to three reels of film; if there was more than one reel, the projectionist had to rewind and change the reels while the audience waited. The movies were accompanied by live piano music. Kuhn charged a nickel for most movies, and a dime for special events.

Edward Kuhn operated the theater through 1913, but in early 1914, he put the theater up for sale at auction. The advertisement for the public sale, held in the theater in February 1914, noted that the theater had been “a good money maker”. The highest bid was $15,000, but that was less than Kuhn thought it was worth, so the theater was withdrawn from sale. Kuhn tried again two weeks later, but again the theater was withdrawn from sale. Six months later, in August 1914, the theater was seized and sold to cover Kuhn’s debts. The Northern Trust Company bought the theater for $7,300. A couple months later, in October 1914, the Northern Trust Company sold it to two theater operators from Philadelphia for $8,300.

The two new owners, Peter Oletzky and Michael Lessy, changed the name of the theater to the Lancaster Theatre, and continued to offer movies and other forms of entertainment while remodeling the theater and increasing the seating capacity to about 900. By January 1916, a new theater manager had been brought on from Philadelphia. While movies were still the theater’s mainstay, other large events were held to augment the theater’s income. One such event was an April 1916 show put on by the Eighth Ward Minstrels accompanied by the St. Joseph’s Church orchestra and choir that attracted more than 1,000 people.

A big change in the program of the Lancaster Theatre was the addition of boxing matches. A boxing ring was set up on the stage for these events, and well-known local and regional boxers would stage matches that attracted packed houses. One example was a bout between Cabbage Hill’s own Leo Houck and Dummy Ketchell of Baltimore.

The Lancaster Theatre got another new manager in October 1916, and he announced a new policy of “musical comedy playlets of the higher class and unexcelled photoplays”. The opening act under this new policy was Rowe and Kusel’s Big Girlie Musical Review, an act that may have indeed been a change for the family-oriented audiences of the Hill. Prices were 5, 10, or 15 cents, depending on the seats. On the downside, because of competition from other attractions in the summer months, the Lancaster Theatre closed down for the entire summer in 1917.

By the spring of 1919, the theater had changed hands again, and was doing business under the name of the Manor Theatre. Movies and boxing matches continued to be the two main draws. Movies had become much more sophisticated in the eight years since the theater had opened. They were still silent, but they had become longer, with more natural performances, and instead of anonymous actors, they now had recognizable stars who drew people to their movies. They also were now being made in Hollywood, California, instead of New York and New Jersey.

Other attractions drew crowds as well, such as a 7-foot eel caught by George Schaller, a neighborhood cigarmaker, in January 1920. Schaller put the eel in his backyard to freeze it solid, and then put it on display in the Manor Theatre. However, a monster eel was apparently not enough to meet the Manor’s profit expectations, and the theater was sold again in the spring of 1920, this time to George Bennethum of Philadelphia for $15,000. He remodeled the theater, updated its projection equipment, and changed the name of the theater to the Strand, a name it would keep until it closed 40 years later. Movies were still the staple, but boxing and other events also were staged. For instance, in the winter of 1921-22, the Duquesne Boxing Club leased the theater for its winter season of matches.

In 1928, the Strand Theatre was sold to Harry Chertkoff, a Latvian immigrant who would own it until he died in 1960. Chertkoff went on to own numerous other theaters in Lancaster County, including the King Theater and the Sky-Vue and Comet drive-ins. His first infrastructure improvement at the Strand was to outfit it for sound to accommodate the industry’s switch to movies with soundtracks. Chertkoff also made major renovations to the Strand in 1933 with the addition of improved acoustics and speakers, and again in 1939 with air conditioning and new seats. He also continued the practice of keeping prices as low as possible. In 1948, when Lancaster City instituted a 10% amusement tax, Chertkoff upped his prices to a still modest 37 cents for adults and 15 cents for children.

After Chertkoff’s death in 1960, his son-in-law Morton Brodsky took over his business interests. The Strand had been losing money for several years, probably related at least partly to the rising popularity of television. In 1962, the theater stopped showing movies, and Brodsky decided to sell the property. While searching for someone to buy the lot and building, Brodsky proceeded to sell the seats, projection equipment, and screen. When the theater building didn’t sell, he decided to just tear it down, and in November 1964, the Strand was demolished. Brodsky stated that he was exploring several options for the site, but in the short term it would be graded and used for parking, which turned out to be the long-term plan as well, as the site is still a parking lot today.

The Kuhn/Lancaster/Manor/Strand Theatre was Lancaster’s only neighborhood theater; all the others were downtown. It was the entertainment center of the Hill, providing movies and other amusements at reasonable prices to Hill residents for more than 50 years. Many a child had his or her early movie experience in the theater, including yours truly in the early 1960s. The 1964 demolition of the last incarnation of the theater, the Strand, not only left a physical gap in the 600 block of Manor, but also a gap in the social and cultural environment on the Hill.