The following are descriptions of Wayne as written in various publications. Although many of these could be used for just about any town, they still offer an interesting view of the Victorian perceptions of small town life.

The New York Times (from the Philadelphia Record), Sept. 17, 1881 (pg. 5)
Suburban Homes for Philadelphians
From the Philadelphia (Penn.) Record.

Messrs. George W. Childs, of the Public Ledger, and A. J. Drexel, the great banker, about a year ago bought 600 acres of land at Wayne Station for $240,000, the tract having a frontage of a mile and a half on Lancaster-avenue and on the railroad. It is the purpose of Messrs. Childs and Drexel to divide the land into building lots of about an acre each, to erect artistic cottages, ranging in price from $2,000 to $8,000, and to dispose of the houses and lots upon payment of about one-third the cost, Messrs. Childs and Drexel advancing two-thirds. A score of novel designs have been prepared by the firm's architects, and from these plans the prospective purchaser takes his choice, so that the beautiful settlement promises to furnish whatever of beauty and variety capital and brains can secure. Upon the landscape gardening $100,000 is to be expended; upon a water supply over $50,000 has already been paid, and upon the general improvement of the new town it is proposed by Messrs. Childs and Drexel to invest $1,500,000. The distance from the city is 13 miles, and arrangements have been made by which monthly trip tickets will be sold for $7. Within two minutes walk of the new station Mr. Childs ahs built the Bellevue Hotel, an ornate drab structure in Queen Anne style, with porches on every side, which rise in tiers to the fourth floor. At the lower end of the tract another hotel, to be calle dthe Audubon, and capable of accommodating 150 guests, will be erected. Surrounding these properties and on Lancaster-avenue will be 500 residences laid out on avenues, having a uniform width of 60 feet and footways from 12 to 15 feet wide. The houses recede 40 feet from the line of the avenue. At a short distance west was the Spread Eagle Hotel property was purchased by the two capitalists in order that no spirituous liquors might be sold near the site of their new city. With a magnificent Town Hall already built, with one large hotel finished and another to be soon started, with unfailing water supply, good drainage, natural beauties, and many millions of capital to push its development Wayne's future is promising.

 

The New York Times (from the Philadelphia Ledger), July 10, 1892 (pg. 20)
The Model Town of Wayne
A Delightful Garden Spot in the Keystone State.
Its wonderful sewage system a pattern for all American communities - what five years' work has done.

Five years of intelligent and well-directed purpose have transformed the rolling hills and fields of Wayne into a town, the sum of whose qualities is tersely described by a popular divine as "the prettiest in the whole country." It has natural advantages which have been utilized and adorned. It has facilities for comfortable and happy living which no other suburb enjoys, and it has a series of improvements, developed mainly by private capital, the like of which will not be found in any other place. Cost has never been spared where effect was desired, and the result is that little or nothing remains to be done in the way of improvement.

The story of Wayne's progress can be briefly told. It was founded by Mr. George W. Childs in conjunction with Mr. Anthony J. Drexel, who have been the untiring promoters of every permanent development of the place, and who have so guided and directed every step toward making Wayne the model town and is to have stamped their names indelibly upon its future. Immediately upon the purchase of the Askin property of 600 acres, the Wayne estate set to work under their direction, and so active has it been, latterly under the management of Mr. Frank Smith, that the unimproved fields of five years ago are now cut up by smooth and shaded roads, dotted with hundreds of houses and kept active by a population of nearly 2,000. The Wayne estate alone has fully $750,000 invested in houses, lands, and improvements of its citizens would probably swell the total capital represented in houses and lands to $2,000,000.
On the farm lands of five years ago the visitor sees at Wayne to day every convenience of city houses, with many they do not enjoy, and with common advantages in the way of religious and secular education, water, air, light, highways, heat, sanitation, and entertainment not found elsewhere.

As old town builders know, it is not so difficult to start a town on a pretty and healthful basis as it is to keep it so. Sooner or later the vital question of drainage must be met, for it will grow as the town grows, and may prove detrimental or positively dangerous to the comfort and health of the inhabitants. How was it at Wayne? The natural advantages for obtaining water were great, and the land afforded a splendid natural drainage. But the question was Might not the drainage eventually annoy the people, and might it not pollute the water? Whether it might or might not in five years, in ten or a hundred years, the Wayne estate determined not to take chances, and, instead of leaving the future of the place to these natural advantages on these important questions, it built a waterworks to supply the people and provided a sewage system for carrying off the waste or other impurities that collect about a house. This system is now not only a pride to its projectors, but a wonder int he scientific world. To the utility of this system, designed by Col. Waring, is due the fact that there is not a single cesspool in Wayne to-day, and that every hosue is underdrained. Certainly, for a country place, this is no small matter for wonder, and yet the whole system is so simple that the novice in sanitary information can easily understand it. As the pure spring water flows through a common main and by smaller pipes into every house in Wayne, so does the waste matter pass from every house in Wayne through sewage pipes into a common main, and thence to a point probably a mile and a half from the Opera House, where by a most interesting process it is part parined, part neutralized and part destroyed.

A twenty minutes' drive from the heart of Wayne over an undulating country with fine roads brings the visitor to the edge of a bit of wood through which a wagon way leads to the quiet vale where Col. Waring's plan is ever relieving Wayne of its sewage. Emerging from the shade of the smooth-bark beeches one comes suddenly into an open space that, but for signs of agricultural and mechanical activity, would delight the heart of a brook-trout fisherman. First, an open space, with a winding stream; then a steep hillside, with clean-trimmed trees, and then all about a fringe of trees and shrubbery, with glimpses here and there of old rail fences and patches of farm land under cultivation. But the open space in the valley is broken by piers of stone, carrying freshly-painted pipes across the creek to a great iron trap by a huge brick-lined and cemented tank, while within a few feet of it rises a pretty brick building containing duplicate pumping machines. No other signs of the handicraft of the builder, save a small wooden structure, much like a tool house, at the top of the hill, are discernible. There all the filth that collects in a town of 2,000 people is conveniently and quickly disintegrated. And this is how: On going over the ground the visitor will notice two square iron-barred traps, much longer than some of the electrical conduit gratings in the city but resembling them in general appearance - one on a slight rise in the lower land, and the other at a higher point on the opposite side of the creek, close by, but slightly higher than the big brick basin.

He will also note regular lines of earth, cinders and stones, stretching like the heavy furrows of a plow in parallel lines, at even distances from one another, from side to side of the lower land and from side to side of the hill. Perhaps they might be described more easily as waves of cinders and stones starting like an erration from the lower trap and from the little house on the hill, and settling in even ridges as if the land had not been low enough or their momentum sufficient to carry them further. Inquiry will show that these ridges were purposely thrown up and that they perform a very important part of the work of sanitation. But when one is told that the sewage that comes pouring in great volumes down the pipes to the traps is conquered here, where oats and grass are growing gustily between the ridges and on the hillside, where vegetation is most active and deflan--- cannot quickly harmonize the conflicting thoughts that bear upon him. Yet all the same he --escently sees the sewage in all its strength changed while he waits from all that is offensive to a residue of pulp and to water as clear and inoffensive as the crystal stream in the unpolluted Ithan.

Now that one's curiosity has been stirred, he will be told that this twelve-acre marvel is divided into five sections for distributing, and say - disinfecting and clarifying purposes - two sections receding creekward from the trap on the lowland and five sections, right, centre, and left, spreading away down the hill from the little frame house. Each section has its ridges, or more properly, its barriers, and they are laid like rows in an ampitheatre, that they may catch and hold until it percolates slowly through them all the fluid matter that comes against them.
And now for the details. Wayne's sewage flows in a steady stream, day and night; in days more than in nights, and on wash days more than others, away from the town, through the woods, across the valley, and into the traps, or either of them, and by the aid of the pumps is forced in pipes up the hilll to a basin in the frame house, or, as its turn may come, to the trap and its two sections on the other side of the creek. By the time it has reached the trap the sewage is at the color and thickness of clouded dishwater, and it splashes thorugh the grating, leaping upon its frame whatever rubbish may have retained its material form in the long and soaking cross-country run. Here the fluid and the solids part company, the fluid passing into the big basin, to be pumped out over the sections, and the solids being raked off the grate, mixed with slack lime, and then burned in the furnace.

When the solids reach the pumping station the form a comparatively small part of the sewage, and, as indicated, are quickly destructed. The fluid forming the great bulk of all the sewage is not so quickly disposed of, because it cannot be destroyed, but the method of its "treatment" is no less effectual in the general purpose of ridding the sewage of its deleterious imperfections. When the basin is filled enough to warrant pumping the impure fluid is drawn to the point of distribution, the sluice for the section intended to receive it is opened, and it pours our over hte land, striding one barrier after another, leaving its impurities against the cinders and burying itself in the soil. The more barriers it passes through the purer and clearer it becomes, until it merges finally clear pure, and wholesome water. All the impurities settle against the barriers, from which they are eventually removed, but they are so insignificant in quantity as almost to discourage the htought of their availability for fertilizing purposes. This, in brief, is the story of Wayne's water supply and sewae, and so smoothly do they dovetail in all that conduces to the satisfaction, convenience, and health of the people, that one may be --ardoned for "going in raptures" over them.

One of the town's most useful and respected citizens is the Rev. Dr. W. A. Patton, pastor of the Wayne Presbyterian Church. In a discourse at his church upon the life work of Mr. Childs, he gave credit to him for the splendid development of the place, but of the place itself he drew this beautiful sketch:

"Look about you in Wayne. What makes our charming town 'the prettiest suburb in the whole country?' Its natural advantages are great, it is true, but not even the natural advantages of an elevated plateau and gracefully sloping hill, with a woodland environment, could make such a desirable home place as we have here. Set man in the most beautiful place that God has fashioned and it may become a plague-spot, but here in Wayne we have the beauties of nature supplemented by the latest and best appliances and powers of science and art. No other town in the whole world can boast as perfect sanitation, and it would be impossible to find a purer or a more abundant water supply. All that scientific engineering can do to protect air and water from contamination has been done, and our citizens may fill their homes with the one and slake their thirst with the other without the slightest fear of fever.

"Here art in architecture has put on her beautiful garments -- has clothed herself in new glory -- and commands the admiration of every beholder, while the unsurpassed combination of beauty and utility, the pleasing proportion of lawn and structure, the harmonious relation of avenue and villa, glorious under the golden sun by day and beautiful under the electric glow by night, give us and maintain for us the first place among suburban towns."

The Ladies' Every Saturday, 7/20/1895
On high and wavy land, beset by hills, now shaded by shapely trees and verdure -- clad, Wayne presents a picture which may delight and soothe the senses by day or by night. The church spires, peaked roofs, gables, and turrets glinting in the sunlight break through the green sea of leaves, and first impress the visitor, but he knows nothing of the place until he rides over its smooth macadam roads and feasts his eyes upon the pictures of domestic charms and elegance.

Rev. Dr. W.A. Patton, as quoted in The Ladies Every Saturday, 7/20/1895
Look about you in Wayne. What makes our charming town the prettiest suburb in the whole country? Its natural advantages are great, it is true, but not even the natural advantages of an elevated plateau, and gracefully sloping hills, with a woodland environment, could make such a desirable home place as we have here. Here art, in architecture, has put on her beautiful garments -- has clothed herself in new glory -- and commands the admiration of every beholder. Whilst the unsurpassed combination of beauty and utility, the pleasing proportion of lawn and structure, the harmonious relation of avenue and villa, glorious under the golden sun by day, and beautiful under the electric glow by night, give us, and maintain for us, the first place among the suburban towns.