The mystery of the Wistar Rats of Red Cedar Hill in Levittown

Daughter Genevieve’s childhood memories include being strapped into the child’s seat on the back of my bicycle while I huffed up Red Cedar Hill in Levittown past builder Bill Levitt’s old mansion. Its crenulated wall conjured up the castle of Sesame Street’s Count Dracula on PBS, a staple in our household. We wheeled past “the Count’s house” many times opposite two large green buildings with steep gables. What went on there?

I now know, thanks to genealogist Dennis Bauer of Levittown whose wife Donna grew up on the hill. In the era of the Great Depression when all of Levittown was farmland, the buildings were a research center for biologists from the University of Pennsylvania. There they bred “Wistar Rats” to achieve incredible advances in treating human disease. The rodents were a species developed and patented by the university.

How the university’s Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology ended up with research labs on Red Cedar Hill is worth exploring.

The institute dates to 1892 when railroad mogul and lawyer Isaac Jones Wistar founded it as a museum/medical college on the Penn campus. He named it after his uncle Caspar Wistar, former chairman of the anatomy department at Penn. In his tenure, Doc Caspar collected human cadavers preserved through wax injections as teaching aids. The new museum exhibited the collection. By the 20th century, the institute became a center of vaccine development and cancer research.

To help pursue that mission in 1928, Effingham Morris of Ardmore willed to the university his 180-acre farm on Red Cedar Hill. Fieldstone farmhouses built in the 1700s and newly constructed, two-story buildings became labs for visiting scientists.

To support research, Penn biologist Helen Dean King bred a unique strain of Norwegian rats. The albino Wistar Rat was revolutionary. In 1936, 50 of the nation’s top zoologists flocked to Red Cedar Hill to view “the most pampered and aristocratic rats in the world,” according to the New York Herald Tribune. A reporter for United Press noted, “In these historic surroundings, the rats have become the standard rats of the world for scientific purposes. They are absolutely free of disease, parasites and ailments found in common rats and they are all white with pink eyes. Food eaten by these regal rodents is raised on the farm and carefully prepared to keep them free from possible infection. When shipped short distances, they are sent in germ-proof cages. When the distance is great a special attendant is sent along with each shipment. Last year an attendant went all the way to Nanking, China, with a bunch of rats for the Chinese Science society.”

Since then, Wistar rats have produced breakthroughs in cardiovascular medicine, neural regeneration, wound healing, diabetes, transplantation, behavioral studies and space motion sickness. The rodents are widely used to test pharmaceutical drugs and are credited with development of the Rubella vaccine.

Though much research occurred on Red Cedar Hill, local knowledge evaporated after Levitt bought the research farm in the 1950s to start construction of 17,000 homes. One of the Wistar farmhouses became his headquarters. Among the first homeowners to buy a Levitt rancher across from the mansion were Gordon “Bud” and Elizabeth Myers. There they raised Donna and three younger siblings. The kids and neighborhood pals, including Donna’s boyfriend and future husband Dennis, frequented a stream-fed pond just below the labs where they dug up fossils, pottery, arrow heads and other artifacts. They fished late in the day and enjoyed hot dogs, catfish and frog legs cooked on a campfire on pointed sticks. “Wintertime at Wistar Pond was filled with ice skating, playing ice hockey and barrel jumping,” recalled the late Gary James Hoffman, Donna’s cousin. “We didn’t use barrels though. We did something far worse. We used ourselves on hands and knees. How many of us could we jump? It’s a wonder any of us survived.”

Lately, developers leveled Levitt’s mansion to make room for new homes. Wistar Pond is gone and the dam has fallen to ruin. The labs on the hill have served at various times as an elementary school, a church, a public school film repository and as classrooms for specialized education. Today, they’re boarded up.

In my view, what was accomplished on the hill should not be forgotten. Just think about what 300 years have meant in the rodent world ― from the deadly black plague spread by mice in Europe in the 1600s to the ascendancy of the Wistar Rat on Red Cedar Hill in the 1900s and how it continues to save humanity from disease.

Given this legacy, I wondered if my wife Mary Anne would appreciate one of the “regal” rodents wearing a bowtie as a Christmas gift?

“No rats in this house!” she said bluntly. “Not even a mouse!”

Sources include “Borman’s Anthology of the Rat” published in 2015 by Academic Press; “ ‘Royal Family’ of Rats Pampered Till Death” published in the Milwaukee Journal on Feb. 11, 1936; “From the Banks of Wistar” by Gary James Hoffmann published in 2021 and memoirs of Dennis and Donna Myers Bauer.

Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: The mystery of the Wistar Rats in Red Cedar Hill in Levittown solved