At
a yard sale, Jonathan
R. Distel purchased some of these dividers, scribes, calipers,
and squares, which were stamped with the initials “F.
C.” When he asked what the initials stood for, the woman
explained she was the granddaughter of Frank Cornell, the
Philadelphia industrialist who built a 300-acre estate in
1929 and the tools she was selling were all his. Later that
same year, Jon found himself working on and managing the restoration
of the very same Main
Line Estate, where he used some of the tools Cornell himself
may have used there seventy years earlier.
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