This is a virtual museum, but featured walking tours of Will Price's utopian community. Visit http://www.rosevalleymuseum.org/contactus.html for details.

Our Museum is virtual; there is no place in Rose Valley where you can see a collection of these objects. However, Rose Valley itself is a wonderful gallery displaying Will Price’s architecture, a beautiful leafy environment and many recognizable remnants of the original Arts and Crafts community. Like Brigadoon, it is invisible to the casual passerby, especially from a car. Rose Valley has to be experienced on foot.

Rose Valley looks the way it does because of the vision of one man, William Lightfoot Price. Even his name has a hint of romance. “Lightfoot” was Will’s mother’s maiden name and can be traced back in Philadelphia Quaker families all the way to William Penn.

The Arts and Crafts movement was part of a larger reaction to the industrial revolution, which began early in the nineteenth century. The invention of the steam engine changed society profoundly. The agrarian/craftsman system that had been evolving for centuries became a factory-based system in less than two decades. Once, all of society in Western Europe and America was devoted to managing the land. Then, suddenly, all but the very rich became slaves to mass production. The land itself became a sort of factory where fuel to fire industrial machinery was gouged from the earth. Coal, gas, oil, and food had to be produced in huge amounts. For a while steam boats, trains and tractors, cast iron buildings, machinery, and furniture, and mass-produced food, clothing, and furnishings seemed quite wonderful. But it didn’t take long for those who had the luxury of time to contemplate life to notice that pollution was blackening every aspect of this new way of life. By the 1850s, designers like Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin had begun to think about the way mass production influenced the quality of life in general and the role of the craftsman in particular.