The Bergdoll Boys, page 59
A dozen lawyers in the estate settlement got about $200,000 in fees. The rest of Erwin’s $2 million estate went to his wife, Magdalena: about $1.4 million.28
One of the lawyers had previously represented Emma’s estate. He approached Alfred after the judge approved the settlement agreement and said he had fought in France during World War I. He said that when soldiers in his unit read about Grover and Erwin running from the draft, they said, collectively, “Good for them.”
Grover, left, and Berta, holding baby Berta in 1939, right, finally settled lawsuits over Emma’s family-guided trust for money that flowed from mother to son and son to mother, unchecked for decades. When Grover’s large estate was settled in the 1970s and re-invested to benefit all nine children and Berta, it had grown to about two million dollars. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania/Philadelphia Record)
In poor health herself, Magdalena Hettmansperger Bergdoll died soon afterward, in 1968. It’s presumed that Erwin’s estate was further dispersed to his children.
Grover’s children were fortunate that their father’s final attorney, David Meade White, Jr., properly arranged Grover’s will to invest his estate and equal distribution among them. Finally, the locks were removed from Grover’s cash hoard, securities, and real estate. Alfred said, “We nursed father’s estate along to a reasonably satisfactory realization. Father would have been surprised to see its value. It was divided equally and provided a nice little financial package for each of his children and our mother.”
_________________
1 This chapter’s detail is based on Alfred’s diary-manuscript. Only he was old and mature enough to recall the events as he did, and his siblings later confirmed his recollections. Additional information, such as the fire at Louis Bergdoll’s mansion, was gleaned from newspapers.
2 Developing the Bergdoll Washington-area property for defense workers was wishful thinking by Berta and Grover. In a settlement agreement giving Grover cash, they had relinquished claim to any portion of Emma’s Somerset, Maryland property. It was held in trust, managed by Louis Bergdoll Bergson and attorneys in Washington.
3 Thomson got Grover’s flying years wrong. The Wright B was mothballed in 1913, and Grover never flew again. Grover often told his children about “hob-knobbing” with SS officers in German bars but Thomson’s declaration that Grover was pro-German was the first public statement of its kind attributed to Grover.
4 The description of Berta Bergdoll’s farm at Harmony Hill, Chester County, Pennsylvania, is mainly based on my personal experience living in Chester County, a few miles away from the farm, for many years. While it’s still a rural-suburban area, it was remote and agrarian in the 1940s and 1950s. Several photographs of the farmhouse and the property survive, helping craft the description of Harmony Hill.
5 Fairchild built its airplanes at a factory in Grover’s old hiding place, Hagerstown, Maryland.
6 The Grigson farm is credited with being the first in Pennsylvania to have a cut-your-own Christmas tree orchard, proving highly successful with Philadelphians who enjoyed a road trip into the country to fetch a Christmas tree.
7 The Wynnefield mansion had been torn down, with the wrecking company salvaging the stone, lumber, and woodwork for its cost and profit. Eagle Field had sat empty for years and was purchased by developers who later built the Manoa Shopping Center and new homes for Philadelphia’s rapidly expanding population.
8 In 1989, a fire at the Bergsons’ Italianate mansion caused by careless smoking drew Philadelphia police and firefighters. They carried Louis Bergson, Jr., 80, from the house suffering from inhaling smoke. Wilbur, 77, was not injured. A few newspaper lines about the fire and the majestic mansion were outnumbered by background linking the Bergson brothers to the infamous Bergdoll family. It proved that changing their name did nothing to relieve the Bergsons of the notoriety.
9 By 1944, Grover had enough of reporters hounding him for a story. One reporter, Harold M. Slater, rebuffed by Grover and the Leavenworth prison warden to grant an exit interview, asked Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman to intercede. Even the future president could not convince Grover to grant an interview as he was released from prison.
10 Alfred said his mother and father, and grandmother, had courted the press for years when trying to gain a pardon for Grover. When reporters were no longer needed, they tossed them off like another piece of their property.
11 The many press photographs depicting Harry Weinberger as the trusted and wise lawyer representing Grover and Berta, and the children, illustrate the trust and confidence they placed in him for decades. Their soured relationship with Weinberger is an example of how they disposed of close advisors as easily as they discarded beloved properties.
12 Broomall merchants recalled making deliveries to Emma’s mansion in the early 1940s, where she held court in the large kitchen with pots and kettles hanging from the ceiling and chickens having free run of the house. Multiple servants maintained the grounds, barn, carriage house, and cars and cooked on Emma’s massive vintage wood-coal stove. She kept dozens of plants and flowers in a cylindrical cut-glass greenhouse on the southwest corner of the long veranda.
13 Emma’s burial location is misidentified in some records at the Bergdoll mausoleum at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. She and her husband, Louis, were buried at Mount Vernon Cemetery in Philadelphia, and their graves remain there.
14 Aside from physical and mental abuse on his family, it’s unknown if there were any other reasons for sending Emma and Mina to a Quaker boarding school so far away from home.
15 Clement Klein could also have been Clemens Klein, a German national from Philadelphia who had a background of working as a servant for wealthy German families in eastern Pennsylvania.
16 Roger Grigson recovered these abandoned Bergdoll artifacts, organized them, and presented them to the Chester County Historical Society and Downingtown Area Historical Society in West Chester and Downingtown, Pennsylvania. They proved invaluable for research into Grover’s legal and financial affairs while he was a fugitive in Germany.
17 Many years later, Harmony Hill Farm was purchased by East Bradford Township, Pennsylvania, and turned into a passive park, Harmony Hill Nature Area. Today, the site of the Bergdolls’ farmhouse and barn, and the brick smokehouse, are accessible to the public via walking trails that begin at Skelp Level Road and meander into the Valley Creek valley below. The foundations for each structure were still visible in 2023.
18 Details of Alfred’s draft evasion, arrest, trial, conviction, and prison sentence come from federal records. He omitted his draft evasion and imprisonment from his diary-manuscript, stating only several years of absence from River Edge. Beginning in 1960, Alfred corresponded with the renowned U.S. government official Alger Hiss, convicted of lying about spying for the Soviets. Alfred and Hiss were in prison together at Lewisburg.
19 Details of Erwin Bergdoll and Roger Grigson’s connection to the incident were provided by newspapers and court and prison records for the shooter.
20 Charles Patterson Van Pelt is memorialized through the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania and the Van Pelt Auditorium at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
21 Emma’s estate was distributed by a 1938 deed of trust to Louis, Charles, Erwin, and Elizabeth, or their heirs. The family reached a settlement with Grover in 1940 with $60,000 in cash and 20 percent of the remainder of Emma’s estate after distribution to his siblings upon their mother’s death. As part of the settlement, Grover also relinquished all claims to a share of Emma’s valuable property near Washington, in Somerset, Maryland.
22 Grover avoided prosecution for Buster’s long truancy because of political conflict over desegregation efforts in Virginia schools that offered families relief from compulsory education laws.
23 Alfred recorded this revelation in his diary-manuscript. It was all hyperbolic bragging by Grover, however, because he didn’t have a pilot’s license and hadn’t flown an airplane since 1913.
24 Charles’ California obituary does not mention his connection to the Bergdolls. While Alfred’s diary-manuscript incorrectly claims Charles died in a mental hospital, Brawn’s obituary states, “San Diego hospital.” Brawn’s grandchildren say Charles had been admitted to a nursing home with vascular disease and died from colon cancer.
25 The mushroom incident is profiled in the Foreword.
26 Harleigh Cemetery was later renamed Camden County Veterans Cemetery.
27 Heritage Memorial Park Cemetery is also known Windsor Gardens Cemetery near Dutton and Soles, Virginia.
28 Alfred Bergdoll’s record shows slightly smaller valuations for Erwin’s estate settlement. The numbers presented here are gleaned from legal documents and 1967 reporting from the Associated Press.
Epilogue
Not long after his father died, Alfred Bergdoll was determined to write the incredible Bergdoll family story. He would call it the Curse of the Bergdoll Gold.
Unfortunately, it never got to publication. The unfinished typed and hand-written document is more diary than manuscript, peppered with many illegible notes scribbled in the margins and taking up entire pages added after the typewriting was done.
To gather information about the family in Philadelphia, Alfred and his siblings traveled to their family origins in the United States in 1967–1969 for tours of the many Bergdoll properties. Alfred, Erwin, and Katharina Bergdoll began at the Broomall farm along the West Chester Pike much broader and more traffic-choked than when it was a gravel path lined with a trolley track in their parents’ and grandparents’ day.
Emma’s mansion of granite walls and red tile roof, built by Charles Bergdoll in 1907 on 12 acres of land, was still standing along with the elaborate carriage house, outbuildings, and chicken shed. A large sign in the weed-filled yard said, Castle Apartments.
They walked to Darby Creek and found the remains of Erwin Bergdoll’s swimming pool behind the stone and concrete dam he built with the bucket scoop of his 1913 Oliver tractor. For so many summers, the grove around the swimming pool was filled with laughter and socializing among Bergdoll family and friends.
Only the skeleton remained of Erwin’s three-story Victorian farmhouse, the original Broomall property developed by their grandfather, Louis Bergdoll, on a hill west of the creek. Erwin bought it in 1911 in preparation for his 1915 marriage to Sarah Parker with 66 acres for $8,000 cash and a $4,000 mortgage. The old yellow barn where Erwin hid from federal agents and Louis stashed his Blériot airplane had fallen in with only the stone foundation and hundreds of slate roof tiles remaining. Erwin’s long narrow machine shop, the resting place of Grover’s Wright B Flyer, was gone, demolished for the widening of the pike.
Across the highway, there was nothing left to see of their father, Grover’s farm, the 88 acres reduced to 75 when they were taken for the wider pike and realignment of Lawrence and Langford Roads.1
Having lived most of their lives in Virginia, Alfred, Erwin, and Katharina could only imagine what it must have been like when their family filled the mansions and grounds and were surrounded by mature trees and landscaping, barns full of livestock, workers, and activity, with race cars in the long driveway and airplanes in the shed … and federal agents spying from the pike.
Later, the three siblings returned to Philadelphia for a tour of the Bergdoll city properties with a longtime family friend, Harry Feldman, who lived near the Bergdolls in Brewerytown and tried to interest Emma to patronize his dress shop. This visit occurred on a Sunday, and in 1968 while meeting Feldman at the Marriott Hotel near the infamous Bergdoll Wynnefield mansion, they could not sip a lager and imagine it was Bergdoll Beer because of Pennsylvania’s Blue Laws, prohibiting alcohol on the Sabbath.2
First, they toured Brewerytown and the many red brick buildings that made up the renowned Bergdoll Brewery. As luck would have it, they were befriended by a man from inside the old brewery building who gave them pads of paper with the imprint of the Bergdoll Brewery buildings and a trademark, a round disc depicting a griffin “in a standing attitude with its right leg raised and resting upon the side of a beer barrel supported upon the barrel stand.” It said, Old Style Lager, The L.B.B. Co., Philadelphia, PA., Established 1849. Trade Mark. The pads were left over when the buildings were sold and resold. The kind man even allowed them inside to climb the worn wooden stairs trod by their grandfather and great-grandfather beneath the iron beams and columns, the concrete floor incised with circles for the iron rims of the great oak beer kegs. They could look up to the ceilings designed by the Philadelphia brewery architect Otto Wolf for the tall beer vats as it was being fermented into tasty and foamy Bergdoll lager.
In 2023, the remaining Bergdoll Brewery buildings were used for office space and apartments. The sign of Bergdoll & Psotta, 1875, remains inlaid on the brick wall of the main brewery building.
Driving up the slight incline of North 29th Street, they found the old Bergdoll mansion used as a Baptist church. While the mansion was somewhat run down, the heavy iron fence with a decorative hops flower at each balustrade remained firmly intact. Even the horse-hitching post remained. Around the corner on Cambridge Street, the three-story carriage house built by Emma after her husband, Louis, died was used as an automobile repair garage. In the back of the carriage house, high above the grain and hay storage bins, was Emma’s four-passenger black barouche, wheels cast aside and its canvas top folded backward. The only reason it remained is that carpenters who rebuilt the large carriage doors for the modern use of the building failed to realize until too late that it would not fit through a smaller opening. From that point onward, the Bergdoll mansion and carriage house were used for apartments.3
Grover’s children, Alfred, Katharina, and Erwin (Bubi) Bergdoll, toured the Broomall farm estate a final time in 1967. Left to right, Katharina Bergdoll standing on the foundation of Erwin Bergdoll’s barn, Charles’ and later, Emma Bergdoll’s mansion, and Alfred and Katharina Bergdoll standing near the door of the remains of their grandfather’s, and later, Erwin’s farmhouse. Their tour was for research and recollections, some of which were used in this book. (Bergdoll Family Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
Alfred, Erwin, and Katharina also admired the three-story brownstone Louise Bergdoll Alter mansion next door, more elaborate than the Bergdolls’ brick mansion and in pristine condition. It had been sold several times without Alter’s magnificent antique furniture.
They toured the former Louis Bergdoll Motor Company building at 18th and Callowhill Streets but quickly moved on from the nondescript building, which offered little interest.
They slowed their automobile tour in front of the large Louis Bergdoll brownstone Italianate mansion at 600 North 22nd Street at Green Street but did not get out or enter the property. Louis’ sons Louis, Jr. and Wilbur still lived there. The two families had not been on cordial terms for years. In 2023, the splendid Louis Bergdoll mansion, built in 1890 for the Pennsylvania Secretary of the Treasury, was split into apartments but still elegantly appointed and furnished.4
Alfred began writing his manuscript and later returned to Philadelphia from his home in New York in 1969 to visit the Bergdoll plots in Philadelphia area cemeteries. He found his grandparents’ graves at Mount Vernon Cemetery, the tall stone obelisk topped by an angel with an outstretched right arm. In the center of the stone is a circular carving of leaves around large interlocking decorative letters, LB for Louis Bergdoll. His name is referenced as junior, although the elder Louis Bergdolls did not share common middle names as would a true senior and junior father and son. Because he died unexpectedly and so young, Emma likely chose the obelisk memorial.
Emma’s parents, Johann Christoph Barth and Margaretha Wilhelmina Doerr Barth, and her brother, Carl Friedrich “Charles” Barth, are buried at Northwood Cemetery, West Oak Lane, Philadelphia.
Also in Mount Vernon Cemetery, Alfred found the grave of his father’s best friend and cohort, co-pilot, and co-racer in youth, Charles Kraus. In his later years, Kraus conducted real estate and insurance business for the Bergdolls and Albert Hall.
A bit farther from the Bergdoll grave, Alfred found a large obelisk, Brawn, surrounded by a low stone wall. It was the final resting place for Charles and Louise Anna Brawn and their daughter Emma C. Brawn, who was accidentally killed by a gunshot on the Broomall farm in 1928. The stone had originally contained the name Bergdoll, but it was recut to install Brawn.
Across the Schuylkill River in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, Alfred visited West Laurel Hill Cemetery and asked the caretaker where to find Lot 318, Montgomery Section.5
“Oh, you mean the Bergdoll tomb,” the caretaker replied. It was a tourist attraction, even in 1969.
Not far from the cemetery administration building is the large light gray Bergdoll mausoleum, erected by Louise Bergdoll Alter. It stands among other great Philadelphia beer families like the Betz’s and Poths. Stained glass windows are on each mausoleum wall, depicting candles burning in them. A concrete walk leads up to the stone block building, with brass and bronze doors. The name Louis Bergdoll Sr is cut into the front of the stone mausoleum below the round dome.6
A small bronze plaque on the wall to the right of the door reads: Erected to their memory by Louise Bergdoll Alter, Elizabeth F. Schoening Rieger, Catherine W. Schoening Sauers, Louise Schoening Shmidheiser. A.D. 1915.
The Bergdolls in the West Laurel Hill Cemetery were initially buried at Mount Vernon Cemetery and moved in 1915 at the direction of the elder Bergdolls’ sister, Louise Alter. It may have resulted from a schism between Louise Alter and Emma Bergdoll, who lived side-by-side in life but eternally apart in death. A perpetual care trust established by Louise Alter still paid for fresh flowers regularly placed in the tomb.
Also in 1969, Alfred visited his cousins, the Strohms, in their comfortable twin stone home in Philadelphia’s Overbrook community. Emma Strohm, Grover’s first cousin and Erwin’s former fiancé, greeted him warmly. Together, they drove into the Philadelphia suburbs to visit with their aging aunt, Elizabeth “Betty” Bergdoll Hall, the only Bergdoll of her generation surviving. Alfred said Aunt Betty was perfectly groomed and dressed.
