Laura Scott Lenton

As the second of ten children to live in the Scott household, Laura gained practical experience in child-raising. She was 20 when the youngest was born, and she saw all but one live to adulthood. Her father, William, was one of seven children and arrived in Philadelphia from Ireland when he was five years old. Her mother was born here to Irish parents.

They were a part of the Point Breeze neighborhood in South Philly where Laura was listed as a seamstress in the 1910 census. Her last name changed to Lenton when she married a fellow Philadelphian in 1917. 

Wilbur Iden Lenton was an office clerk but became a salesman for a gas company by 1920 after they moved to Gloucester City, New Jersey. That didn’t last, so they moved to the suburb of Collingdale, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. Wilbur worked as a mechanic at the General Electric plant in southwest Philly not far from Mount Moriah.

William Scott also moved his family to the Garden State for a time before moving back to Pennsylvania. They lived in Laurel Springs, a town that started as a housing development around the turn of the century. (The real estate mogul behind that enterprise, also buried at Mount Moriah, has a colorful life story that can be found here.)

Laura remained close to her siblings and their children but never had the privilege of raising her own. In 1922 she lost her only daughter during childbirth when she suffered a stroke.

Wilbur had a variety of other jobs over the years: at Gimbel’s department store in 1928, as a mechanic in 1930, and on the 1940 census as a statistics expert for the Justice Department’s  Immigration and Naturalization Service. 

That census also showed the couple had separated and he was living with his mother. Wilbur listed his brother as next of kin on his 1942 draft card. The divorce papers were filed in 1948 on grounds of desertion, as this news clipping explained. At the time he was working as an attendant at the Lakeland Tuberculosis Hospital in Blackwood, New Jersey. All of the employees were required to live there, and that is where the 1950 census records his residence.

That census found Laura working as a live-in housekeeper for a 73-year-old widower and his single 30-year-old daughter in the Overbrook Park section of West Philadelphia. She may have stopped working three years later when she turned 65 and could receive Social Security checks for the next 38 years.

She may have lived for a time with one of her sisters or nieces. At some point during this last phase of her life she crossed the river to New Jersey one last time, moving to the Burlington County nursing home known as Buttonwood Hall. Laura’s 100th birthday party was there, and shared with two other residents who reached that age in the same month. Four of her nieces and one grand-niece came to help her celebrate.

Sometime later, she moved to Bible Presbyterian Home in Delanco, New Jersey. That’s where Laura died a few weeks after her 103rd birthday. Only two of the nieces survived her, and she was buried with the only other family member who was at Mount Moriah, her mother.