The Atwater-Cleveland Photograph Collection

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In June 2026, PFPA acquired a collection of 900 Atwater-Cleveland family photographs, spanning from the 1840s to the 1960s. Many were taken at Painter's Folly and offer a rare window into the Chadds Ford landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. We're currently digitizing the collection before donating it to a permanent archive.

The Cleveland-Atwater era was one of the most transformative chapters in Painter's Folly's history.

Dr. Arthur Cleveland, a laryngologist on staff at Presbyterian Hospital and the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, became owner of Painter's Folly and its 500 surrounding acres in 1903. A former ward of Joseph and Eliza Turner of Chadds Ford, he also served as President of the Birmingham Township Board of Supervisors.

Together with his father-in-law, Richard Mead Atwater, Dr. Cleveland ran Lafayette Dairies — one of only two local dairies selling milk in glass bottles.

By 1906, Richard Atwater had moved into Painter's Folly himself, while the Clevelands relocated to the neighboring Gideon Gilpin House. The Atwaters purchased the home and 47 acres outright in 1908. Richard Atwater — a glass manufacturing magnate and former mayor of Sea Isle City, NJ — became a local authority on the Battle of the Brandywine, regularly lecturing on Revolutionary War troop movements. (His wife, Sophia Greene Atwater, was a descendant of General Nathaniel Greene, Washington's second-in-command at the battle.)

In the decades that followed, the Cleveland-Atwater family's holdings — including Washington's Headquarters, Lafayette's Headquarters, Painter's Folly, Wyndryst, Turner's Mill, and Red Barn Farm (Kuerner Farm) — placed the family at the center of the very debates that led to the creation of today's Brandywine Battlefield Park, formally established with the Brandywine Battlefield Bill of 1947.

Richard Mead Atwater died at Painter's Folly in 1922. The property remained in the family until 1953, when it was sold to John and Mary Fisher, closing a fifty-year chapter in which the Clevelands and Atwaters helped shape the agricultural and historic identity of Chadds Ford and the Brandywine Valley.