This is no ordinary park.
Not only is Graeme Park green and beautiful, with nice places to walk, a pretty pond, and quacky ducks, it is also immensely entertaining for anyone with a pulse and penchant for stories of people who misbehave.
Graeme Park was the home of Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson, once named "the most learned woman in America."
Born in the early 1700s in an age where virtually everyone was illiterate and women were denied higher education, Fergusson gave 'em all the F U and taught herself everything. She became famous for her writing and poetry and hosted America's first evening literary salons which meant people had to put aside the butter churns, lace up and head over for a lit and poetry jam.
Her story has some crazy twists and turns including Just Saying No to marrying Ben Franklin's boy, to secretly marrying a penniless dickbag Brit loyalist who chowed down on her cash and ran for exile when they lost the war, leaving her with no dollars and no cents, just her property ... but since the husband was a Brit licking traitor, it was confiscated. One can only imagine what her poems became then.
Anyway she hustled the property back into her hands and spent her remaining days selling off pieces of it to survive. At some point the guilts got ahold of her about her secret marriage so she girded her loins to tell her dad. While you are touring her original home ($6 -- worth every nickle), you will be in the same room she was, by the same window sill she sat in, gazing out the same window she did at her father coming down the stone path toward the house, carrying a cup of tea, when boom he keels over and dies just like that and she never gets to tell him she was bad. Talk about guilt! Shame! It's a great story, and it keeps getting better.
Not to mention the tour guide -- he is solid gold! Tremendously entertaining in his own right, our retired microbiology professor turned tour guide knew EVERYTHING about her, her family, and the house. It was by turns dishy and deep and really gave me the chills - a true sense of what it meant to live in colonial and revolutionary America, and how so many aspects of the human experience transcend time.
TIP: Before you take the house tour, take a few minutes to read the story boards, and absolutely watch the video. It's a little weird, filmed in VHS and oddly narrated, it's also a fabulous orientation to what you're about to see. read more