Week 6: Arthur in the News

        Last week, besides attending the Small Museum Association Conference, I attended my first ever museum board meeting at Glen Foerd. Through my experience at Glen Foerd and conversations in my Museum Studies class, I gathered that the board at Glen Foerd was unique. Many of the board members were original members, having served on the board for decades. Continually, all of the board members are local to the area, and most of them actually live within a two-block radius of the mansion. Because the board members have been involved at Glen Foerd for so long, many have a personal attachment to the mansion, and all of them have a vested interest in the area of Northeast Philadelphia, Torresdale, where the mansion is located. From what I’ve witnessed so far, this causes the board to be more hands-on and less diverse than most museum boards. There are certainly both positives and negatives to this specific board—one thing is for certain: this group loves Glen Foerd. The dynamic will be interesting to observe as my internship continues.

This week I have been back on the hunt for more information about Arthur Laws and other servants. I took the advice of an employee at the Urban Archives located at Temple University and searched through the Philadelphia Inquirer online database, available through the Access World News Research Collection. The collection allowed me to access editions of the Inquirer as early as 1829, though I focused my search on the first half of the 20th century. I found dozens of articles about Robert Foerderer, including details about his purchase and renovation of Glen Foerd, his political life, and advertisements for various positions at his factory. This I expected—but any articles mentioning Arthur Laws, I did not. My heart skipped a beat when two articles popped up after searching his name! The first article I opened listed Arthur Laws as a member of the International Society of Waiters and Bartenders, and explained that the membership of the organization numbered over two hundred. The Inquirer printed the article, “Waiters’ Soceity Elects Officers” on October 28, 1900. From census information, I know Arthur was living in Philadelphia and employed as a waiter—it is likely, but not definite that this article referred to Arthur Laws the butler at Glen Foerd.

The second article I read, entitled “They Were Easy: Persons Seeking Situations Paid Money to a Supposed Employer,” was from 1898, when Arthur was relatively new to Philadelphia and working as a waiter. The inquirer listed his name as one of five men who testified against a con man who had “been going around representing that he had been authorized to engage fifty waiters to work at a two weeks’ fair…and from those who accepted his offer he is alleged to have obtained $1.10 to purchase their railroad tickets.” Following their payments, the conman failed to appear at their scheduled meeting time, and the men discovered there was no fair at all. When I read about Arthur, a young man struggling to find work in a new city, being swindled, I felt disheartened for him—until I remembered he ended up as a butler at a beautiful mansion in the suburbs of Philadelphia! He certainly struggled, but (as far as I can tell) things turned out for the best in the end.