Still Image

Today Cobbs Creek and the West End Mill meadow are in Cobbs Creek Park below the intersection of Catherine & 63rd Street (Cobbs Creek Parkway). 

The meadow in which stood West End Mill. Today the site is in Cobbs Creek Park in the basin below the intersection of Catherine & 63rd Street (Cobbs Creek Parkway). There is no historical marker. 

This famous photo by Lewis W. Hines shows child laborers in a Macon, GA textile mill in the early 1900s. Hines’s caption reads: “Many youngsters here. Some boys were so small they had to climb up on the spinning frame to mend the broken threads and put back the empty bobbins.” Hines’s image is an apt representation of child laborers in cotton mills South and North

West End Mill Interior Diagram

West End Mill Exterior Diagram

Contemporary photo of the 6100 block of Cedar Ave. shows West End houses that retain some of the original architectural features that marked them at the turn of the twentieth century.   

In this Evening Bulletin photo of orientation activities at House One, Rodney Davis, 16, take notes on the courses he plans to take. Each sheet has a course description. 

In this Evening Bulletin photo, new Free School students, Gordenia Burrell (left) and Norman Washington, chat with teacher Richard Seymour as other students and faculty members gather (background) in House One. Seymour was the head teacher at House One (3833 Walnut Street). 

Left to right: John Mount, of the training section of the U.S. Post Office; Linda Powell, West Philadelphia High School (WPHS), junior moving to the Free School; Dr. Aase Eriksen, Penn GSE lecturer and director of the Free School; Donald Colman, WPHS junior also at the Free School; and Richard Seymour, head teacher of the Free School's first unit, House One (3833 Walnut Street) review books for House One.”

In 1969, West Philadelphia High School’s enrollment was 99 percent African American, with some 3,800 students packed into a building whose capacity was 2,400. The high school’s principal, Walter Scott, saw the Free School as a means both to reduce overcrowding at WPHS and to outsource the main building’s disruptive students, especially its gang members.