Press about Ardrossan
In 1911, Robert Montgomery, a wealthy Philadelphia stockbroker, commissioned the architect Horace Trumbauer to build his family a home. He chose 300 acres of rolling pasture in an enclave northwest of the city called the Main Line, where, beginning around 1880 and lasting until after World War II, a portion of the American aristocracy lived out a version of English manor life on gentleman farms and large estates.
The Montgomerys may have been just another Main Line family saddling up for the Radnor Hunt and hosting parties for the Social Register set in the ballroom of their estate, Ardrossan. But they achieved a degree of fame beyond this clubby realm as the family that inspired “The Philadelphia Story,” the play and movie starring Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord, an irrepressible society girl (and proto-feminist) sorting out romantic entanglements on the eve of her wedding.
Main Line Television Interview with Author David Nelson Wren
While fox hunting across the fields of Villanova—a stretch of countryside on the Philadelphia Main Line—in the early 20th century, a young investment banker named Colonel Robert Leaming Montgomery fell from his steed and was knocked out cold. When he regained consciousness, a sweep of rolling hills, old-growth forests, and snaking streams came into focus. Arcadia, he thought. So he bought it.
In 1911, he hired celebrated Gilded Age architect Horace Trumbauer to design a three-story, fifty-room Georgian Revival mansion, framed by flagstone terraces and a carpet-like bowling green. Down the hill, he set up a dairy, with nine Ayrshire cows imported from Scotland, and a broodmare stable, with seven mares and a stallion from Ireland. He named the whole lot Ardrossan, after the Scottish town from which his ancestors had emigrated.
In 1911, when Horace Trumbauer was commissioned to design Ardrossan, a 50-room Georgian Revival manor house in Villanova, his work was already considered the epitome of Gilded Age architecture. He had designed Lynnewood Hall for Peter A. B. Widener and opulent mansions for the Elkins family up and down the East Coast. The one thing Trumbauer never planned to design was a movie set. Yet, that is what happened.
In 1939, the social whirl at Ardrossan inspired a Broadway play, The Philadelphia Story, then a film of the same name the following year starring Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. The movie was not actually shot on location because Hollywood executives deemed it too unbelievable, but audiences were so entranced by the story of Main Line socialites that it was adapted as a musical in 1956 featuring Grace Kelly.