I'm here on one of my favorite trails in Schenley Park, and springtime has finally arrived in the city of Pittsburgh.

Now, if you're familiar with the city of Pittsburgh at all, you know the name Schenley.

It's one of like, five names that everything in the city seems to be named for.

There's Carnegie, there's Mellon, there's Frick, there's Heinz, and there's Schenley.

Carnegie is known for steel.

Frick is known for Coke.

Heinz is known for ketchup and pickles.

Mellon is known for banking.

So what's Schenley known for, anyway?

Well, I'm glad you asked.

It was actually Mary Schenley and her scandal that helped shape the city that we know and love today.

I'm.

Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain to.

You.

You know, it's not news to most of you that Schenley Park was donated to Pittsburgh in 1889 by Mary Schenley on the condition that it would remain park land forever.

This was actually probably one of the greatest things that ever happened to the city of Pittsburgh.

It was the first in a long series of improvements that changed the city from a crowded, disgusting town to a slightly more spread out, slightly less disgusting town.

By the turn of the 20th century.

Now, if we want to get the full picture of Mary Schenley's, heritage, we have to go back to the beginning of Pittsburgh and a man named James O'Hara.

James O'Hara was one of the first pioneers in the area.

He was an Irish soldier who moved over here after.

We won our independence.

And he gravitated to the frontier because he knew that's where the future was at of the country.

And he was actually one of the first government contractors.

And he made his money by selling weapons to the militias that would go out into the northwest Territories, which at the time included Ohio, and pushed the Native Americans further and further west.

He got really rich doing this, and he bought up a bunch of land in the forks of the Ohio area, because he knew that that would probably be a great place for a city in the future.

Turns out he was right.

And Colonel O'Hara had a daughter named Mary as she married the son of another pioneer, and her husband's name was William Croghan, Jr.

He was also a rich trader, and he was, in a similar vein of, of James O'Hara.

And they had a daughter named Mary Elizabeth.

Croghan.

And she's the Mary that you have to remember.

It gets confusing.

There's there's three generations of Mary's in there, but our Mary is Mary Elizabeth Croghan, born in 1826.

Hey, everybody.

Editing Noles here, popping in to add a little bit more context.

As usual, I ended up going deeper down the rabbit hole while I was in the editing process.

I don't know why I keep doing this to myself, but I just wanted to add this in here for you so you can kind of get even a better idea of just how powerful Mary Schenley's family was.

So in the picture that you just saw before this one, you see that Mary Carson is her grandmother.

That's the Carson family that used to own a lot of the South Side, which is why it's called Carson Street.

And if you go on William Croghan Jr's line, his father was obviously William Croghan senior, who was married to Lucy Clark, who was the older sister of William Clark, aka Lewis and Clark.

You know, the guy that helped discover the entire western part of our country.

And then their uncle or I'm sorry, William Caron's uncle was George Croghan, who if you've been on the eastern side of the state on highway 522, is called the Croghan Pike.

That's named after him because he did so much traveling and and trading with the Native Americans in that area.

So it just kind of blew my mind.

Found out these facts in quick succession.

And it shows that Mary Schenley's family is important not only on a regional level, not only on a state level, but also on a level of national importance.

So just want to throw that in there.

Enjoy the rest of the video.

Now, because the sons were well-off, they wanted their daughter to have the best education that money could buy.

This meant that she ended up at a prestigious all girls boarding school on Staten Island.

It was there that a British Army captain arrived at port one day, and his name was Edward Wyndham Harrington Schenley.

He was 43 years old, and his sister in law was the one running the boarding school.

That's why he was there.

He was looking for a place to recover from an illness.

Somehow he met the 15 year old Mary or Mary Croghan and they met and fell in love.

Now, her father forbade this because he said, this guy's 43 years old.

What are you doing?

And she said to him, I love him.

And they eloped and they ran off to England.

Her father fainted upon hearing this news, and the boarding school actually went out of business because of the bad press it received.

I mean, this was a scandal.

This is a 15 year old rich American heiress going off to England by a guy who's old enough to be her father.

This is just not going to happen.

I forgot to mention, by the way, that the captain was twice widowed by this point, and both of those prior marriages had also started with allotments.

And sources differ on this, whether it was actually an illness that brought him to port or whether he was deserting his duty in British Guiana to suppress the slave trade down there.

It's a little murky.

Maybe he wasn't such a great guy.

Surprise, surprise.

So, Colonel Croghan cut off communication with the couple.

At this time, Mary's mother was dead, which meant that she was the sole heir to a pretty sizable chunk of property throughout the Pittsburgh area.

Something that her grandfather, James O'Hara had bought.

And then her father, William Croghan Jr, had inherited.

And now it was up to her.

However, her father actually went to the state legislature to pass a bill to disinherit her from this so that Captain Schenley couldn' get his hands on it.

So it was set in a trust.

And sometime later, sources differ as to when Colonel Crogha had his, change of heart.

And he actually went to London to visit the couple and their children, and he pleaded with them to move back to Pittsburgh.

And he even built them a house called picnic House to entice them to move here.

And, they might have visited, you know, a few times where they didn't stay very long and they never lived in a picnic house.

In 1850, Mary's father died, and she began a lengthy court proceeding to return her inheritance to her to get out of that trust.

And she was successful in this.

But if you look on old maps up until 1878, the landowner is marked as Captain EWH Schenley and not her, even though she was the legal owner of the land.

By all accounts, Mary never had a change of heart, never felt like she was being taken advantage of.

The couple was married for decades until the captain's death in 1878.

They had 11 children over those years, and some of those children actually married into British nobility.

So now, after her husband's death, Mary becomes a wealthy widow.

She has about $5 million in estates in England and about $50 million worth of property here in Allegheny County.

And in true Pittsburgh fashion, she became a philanthropist.

She donated a lot of land to the city and to different groups throughout her lifetime, and a lot of it was also developed after her death in 1903, she owned not only Schenley Park, but she also owned the place where the Carnegie Museum and Library is in Oakland, as well as CMUs campus, as well as actually most of Oakland.

She also owned and donated probably the most unique building in Pittsburgh.

That's the Fort Pitt Blockhouse down in what's now Point State Park.

She donated that to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Unfortunately, picnic House is no longer standing today.

It actually did stand until 1942, at which point it was surrounded by a golf course.

And then later on in the 40s and 50s, the neighborhood of Staunton Heights was built up on that same property, and no trace of the estate remains at all.

Today.

Today, of course, there's no shortage of things named after Mary Schenley.

There is, of course, Schenley Park.

There's the Schenley Tunnel, the Schenley Bridge, Schenley Plaza, Schenley Fountain, the old Schenley High School.

I'm sure I'm missing someone there.

You can put those down below in the comments.

So even though it's pretty scandalous how Mary became a Schenley, I'm kind of glad it worked out that way, because can you imagine this being called Croghan Park or the neighborhood of ACroghan Farms?

Here's what I missed earlier.

You know what?

If she hadn't met anybody at boarding school and she came back to Pittsburgh and had her social debut as a socialite and married into the Mellons or the Eagles or some other up and coming family at the time.

It might have just melded into the history pages and, what if she hadn't lived in London her whole life?

You know what?

If she had lived here in that land, would have been sold off piecemeal throughout her life, and we might not have had the intact tract of land that is Schenley Park, or the way that they were able to plan Oakland because they could buy all the land at once.

I think those historical what ifs are really interesting.

And if you're into those historical questions and the history of Pittsburgh writ large, then, subscribe to the channel.

You know, leave a comment down below.

Like the video.

But before you leave, I want you to follow me.

I need to make some more headway down this trail.

But there is one piece of Mary Schenleys legacy that I don't think many people get to see, and I'm going to go see if I can get in there, and I'm going to take you with me.

Okay, so obviously I'm filming this on a different day.

As you can see, it's a little cloudier.

It's about 15 degrees colder than it was.

But as I said, it's spring in the city and our secret location is inside of this very not so secret building that I'm sure you're familiar with.

This is, of course, the Cathedral of Learning in Oakland.

And, I hope the room's open today.

I'm going to go in there and check it out.

So I'm here with Michael Walters in the Schenley room.

And, Michael, what is your role at?

At Pit?

I'm the manager of education programs in the Nationale Rooms, and we're in the Croghan Schenley Ballroom, which is one of the historic properties that my department administers.

It is not part of our normal tour of Nationale two rooms, because it's not a room that had the same origination as the gifts that we're the nationality rooms.

But this is a historic Pittsburgh property that was given to the university by a man who purchased the historic picnic house in Staunton Heights.

This was a residence that was built by William Crum, and he intended this ballroom that we're in to be the room in which his young daughter, Mary Croghan, would come out to society, and her debutante, Mary, however, was sent at age 15 to Long Island, where she eloped with a man in his early 40s.

There was a British officer with the last name of Schenley, and she became Mary Schenley.

She never used the house, and when she was approached to provide land to the city of Pittsburgh, she gave a large bequest of land which became Schenley Park.

But the house fell into disrepair, and so by the mid 20th century, the man who purchased it, who was a builder, decided to offer the interior of the ballroom to the University of Pittsburgh, and it was deconstructed and put back together in this location.

It's an outstanding example of 1830s Greek Revival architecture in the United States.

And can you show us some of these, architectural details that make the room so special?

Yeah, it's the painted wooden fluted columns are mounted by, very elaborately carved Corinthian columns.

Excuse me, the Corinthian capitals.

And on top of that is this equally elaborate entablature that, reveals the ceiling.

All of these are original details to the room.

The room, by necessity, had to be fitted into this space, so it actually cut down 18in shorter than it would have been in the picnic house.

And the interstitial spaces between the pilasters and the columns, are university installed.

Plaster plasterboard.

So the painted decoration you see on that is 20th century.

The decorative objects that were part of this room, reside in a different collection.

They are in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art.

So in the 1960s, just a few years after the installation of this room was completed, there was a local interior designer who came and outfitted the room with some appropriate period antique furniture, such as the two Swann Chaise Lounge is that we have in the room.

This room, however, is used by administrative, personnel for a variety of meetings, and some years ago, the chief of staff, for the Chancellor's office decided to switch out the furniture, which would have dated back to that 1960s redecoration.

And the ebony ized cane chairs were removed, and the seating capacity of this room fell from 24 to 20.

So there are these modern takes on federal style chairs around the central table, but as you can see, the tables and set for an event that will occur tomorrow, it's used usually once or twice a week for such events.

So we might have, philanthropic, an alumni engagement arm of the University of Pittsburgh, hosting visitors here.

We might have different academic departments having parties or, visiting scholars come and they are given a soiree here.

So we have, for example, the Department of Sociology next week, having the room the entire day.

Interviews are sometimes held in this room, and very occasionally we do have people from the public who have an interest in historical architecture wanting to see the room.

So we have partnered with Pittsburgh history and Landmarks occasionally when they have wanted to show this room.

Wow.

Well, thank you very much for letting me in here.

I, I know it's an exclusive club, but, I guess if you're a big name on YouTube, maybe I'll let you in and, and these paintings over here, this is Mary Schenley here on the wall.

Yes.

These paintings do not date all the way back to the lifetimes of these people.

They are copies of the paintings, but they are actual paintings and not photographic reproductions struck onto canvas.

So Mary Schenley and then her father, William Croghan, further down the wall.

These are really well done paintings.

Yes.

Even if they don't go all the way back.

I'm I'm a big fan.

The chandelier is another, lovely piece of artwork in the room.

It is an example of a crystal and or Maloof chandelier, which is gilded bronze, featuring griffins and a good deal of classically inspired decoration.

I didn't even notice the Griffins on there.

That's a good detail.

I think what what strikes me is just the opulence of this room.

Obviously, there were well-to-do family, but, for a house called picnic, it sounds kind of funny.

It sounds like it should be a little cottage in the country.

Apparently, it must have been a fairly large house.

There were two rooms that were associated with this installation.

The other room, which is behind the rear door of this space, opened in what was known as the Oval Room, which would have been a room where ladies might have gotten ready before they came in for a debut party.

Okay, that room, however, is not available, for any sort of departmental meetings.

It is part of the suite of chancellors staff offices.

And so it has been changed around and over the years.

Okay.

Well, Michael, thank you very much for letting me come in here and, and film, this is really, an impressive space, and I think it does a good job of carrying on, another aspect of Mary Shelley's legacy to Pittsburgh by being tangentially related to her, as everything in Pittsburgh seems to be.

Absolutely.

A lot of people are interested in this room because they know the name Schenley.

And then when they come in and they see the architectural opulence, it's usually the wow factor.

And they wonder, why is it even in the school building?

Right.

And it is an unusual room that has limited use.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, well thank you again.

And everybody, thank you so much for watching.

And I'll see you in the next one.

Well, I hope you enjoyed seeing the inside of the Croghan Schenley room.

That took me a very long time to get into that room.

As you can tell, things have gotten much greener since I filmed the first part of this video, but that's okay.

It's a pretty exclusive club, and, I guess you have to make award winning documentaries on YouTube to get in there.

So once again, thank you for watching.

It really means a lot to me.

If you like this video, please like, subscribe, comment, share it with your friends and family.

And I hope you like the story of how Mary became a Schenley and the scandal that helped form Pittsburgh.

I'm Noles and I explore and explain.