If you’ve got a love for great Philly architectural history coursing through your veins and are walking around with an extra $6.5 million in your pockets, then you are in luck.
The historic Bergdoll Mansion, located in Fairmount — is now for available for sale for $6.5 million. If you think the name Bergdoll is recognizable from somewhere, then you have good instincts. The Louis Bergdoll Family were the proud owners of the City Park Brewery in North Philly (started in 1856), which helped establish Philadelphia as a top brewery city.
Perhaps its most famous family member was Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, whose Wright Model B Plane made over 740 aerial trips between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, New Jersey — a trip that he himself was the first to successfully attempt. The plane would eventually be donated to the Franklin Institute.
But Bergdoll would be remembered not only for his skills of aviation but rather his draft-dodging during World War I, when he failed to return a questionnaire and to take the accompanying physical. After finally being apprehended at his home in January of 1920 — Bergholl was sentenced to five years imprisonment. After persuading authorities into being released in order to recover gold the he buried in Virginia, he escaped from law enforcement in Philadelphia. After nearly 18 years of being pursued in Europe — he finally surrendered in 1939 and died in 1966. The man who was drafted to World War I in Bergdoll’s place was the first man in his draft class to be killed in the war.
Philadelphia’s Bergholl Mansion was constructed in the Italianate Style in 1886 and designed by the renowned architect James H. Windrim. The interior has two bathrooms and nine bedrooms. The mansion was last sold in 2012 for $6.9 million.
Michael Thomas Leibrandt is member of the York Road Historical Society and lives and works in Abington Township.
