Century-old Devereux campus is demolished to bring 10 more single-family homes to the Main Line

Searching for a building to house her namesake school in the late 1910s, Helena Devereux settled on a pastoral stone home on Philadelphia’s Main Line that, for over 100 years, served as a campus for one of the nation’s leading centers for children and adults with developmental disabilities.

This week, the home and campus in Devon, known as the Stone and Gables, was demolished to make way for multimillion-dollar homes.

Main Line developer Tom Bentley is turning the property into Rose Glenn, a 10-unit development in the Chester County suburb where the developer said there’s little room left to build.

“When I started in this business, it was pretty easy to find land,” said Bentley, whose company has operated in the Philadelphia suburbs for 50 years. “It’s just harder and harder now … if I can do these 10- or 12-, or 15-lot developments in the Main Line, they’re priceless.”

Bentley said Rose Glenn’s homes would break from the McMansion design that was popular earlier in the century, offering a “cottage” look with around 4,400 square feet of living space and finishes like bay windows and shingled roofs with gables.

The developer estimates the properties will hit the market in the low $2 millions.

Bentley purchased the Highland Avenue property from Devereux in October 2022. It’s not the first of the nonprofit’s properties that Bentley has repurposed. He’s also the developer behind Worthing, an early 2010s Newtown Square housing development built on the site of another former Devereux facility.

“When these properties get to the point where they’re not worth using anymore, they sell,” Bentley said.

Devereux’s standing and reputation was rocked in 2020 by an Inquirer investigation revealing that dozens of children had been sexually abused by staff at Devereux’s campuses in Pennsylvania and in other states over a quarter-century period, prompting Philadelphia officials to remove 53 children from its schools. The nonprofit has continued to operate nationwide.

A Devereux spokesperson said a “variety of factors” went into its decision to close the Stone and Gables campus.

“Devereux has a long-standing tradition of high-quality educational programming, and the Devon property’s roadways and residential environment were not as well suited for school buses versus other locations across the region,” the spokesperson wrote in an email Wednesday. “As a result, a decision was made to sell the property.”

The Devon campus had not been in use in several years when it entered “what you could call an estate sale” during the pandemic, said Colleen Gray, Easttown Township’s director of planning and zoning.

Bentley’s purchase came with one stipulation before demolition: The township required that the developer document the original Devereux stone building, which fell under the purview of the township’s Historical Commission.

“It’s an old building. It’d been so remodeled and turned into dormitory type-living,” Bentley said, adding that the Historical Commission found “nothing of historic value” within.

The purchase closed a period of uncertainty for the campus and its neighbors.

In 2019, Stone and Gables was the site of protests from immigration rights activists who mobilized after the nonprofit sought to convert the property to house around 40 undocumented migrant children who had been detained by the federal government after crossing the Southwest border alone.

Protesters called the proposed facility a “detention center” that would have subjected children to jail-like conditions. It was the second migrant facility proposed for the area. Devereux would have received $14 million in government funds to open it, along with four facilities in other states.

Neighbors like Brad Vanderau, too, were wary of the plan.

Vanderau said that in 2019, he had believed that Devereux was planning to sell the property to a private developer (a move similar to what would become the Rose Glenn plan). When Devereux pivoted to the migrant housing proposal, Vanderau said, he’d felt it was sprung upon neighbors without input.

Outside of Vanderau’s home Wednesday morning, excavators swung their hulking yellow arms, leveling the last remnants of the Stone and Gables campus.

Vanderau said that he was pleased he was able to review the Rose Glenn plan ahead of its construction and that the vacant property would finally be put to use.

“It’s good for the township in a sense. You’re going to have more tax revenue coming in, [and] it only increases the population,” he said. “There’s going to be a few more cars, but I don’t think it’s going to be that big of a deal.”