William Robert Matchett

When Philadelphians are asked who was the biggest homebuilder of the 20th century, many would remember Abraham Levitt, who managed to construct 17,300 homes between 1952 and 1958 in the Bucks County community known as Levittown, Pennsylvania. Bill Matchett’s numbers were nowhere close to Levitt’s, but his accomplishments were just as remarkable for the era in which he lived.

The timing was right for Levitt & Sons in the years after the war that saw great demand for affordable housing. So it was for Bill as the nation emerged from an economic depression after the Panic of 1873. Industrial growth meant job opportunities which meant that the waves of immigrant laborers coming to Philadelphia needed housing. 

Bill was himself one of those immigrants from Ireland many years earlier. He was a teenager when he arrived, worked as a carpenter, and became a naturalized citizen at age 22. Four years later, in 1852, he married the love of his life, whose name was Lovey Elliott. They filled their house with eleven children although one lived only nine months.

Having mastered the trade, he developed his skills building entire houses in the years after the Civil War. He knew about windows, doors, and building load-bearing walls, but he also built relationships with experts in plumbing, masonry, and gas-fired boilers and stoves. Homebuilders have to negotiate with sub-contractors to do a variety of specialized jobs.

It’s also helpful to know the right people when it comes to local politics. Bill joined a group that campaigned for a certain candidate from the 26th Ward, then in 1879 he sought a Republican nomination for a seat in the city’s Common Council. Losing that bid put an end to any further runs for office but he met and made many friends. Anthony Drexel may have been one of them.

Bill’s big break came in getting to know Anthony or one of his two Drexel brothers. They were members of the wealthy banking family started by their father, and Anthony founded today’s Drexel University. This newspaper clipping shows the scope of the job he was given. With the money he made from that arrangement, his career shifted. He could now afford to build homes for his own benefit instead of building for other landowners. In doing so, he helped transform South Philly farmland into an urban landscape where individual homes were within reach of newly settled immigrants, a far cry from the tenements some of them found in New York.

Until 1854, the southern edge of the city limits was South Street, beyond which were mostly seed and truck farms and the beginnings of a burgeoning brickyard industry. Development slowly progressed to Washington Avenue but the area to the south between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers was known as “the Neck.” In the 1880s, Bill was a prominent “down the Neck” builder, shortened to “down-town” as opposed to points north in “center city” or “up-town.”

This story in the Times chronicles the growth and mentions Bill’s part in it. He discovered a different revenue stream when he learned that, instead of selling the homes, he could rent them. At the time of this article he owned 53 houses in the vicinity of 13th and Morris. While he was not the most prolific builder in the city, it was recorded that he built 3500 homes by 1891, making him a worthy contender for the title of “the Abraham Levitt” of his day.

The advertisement at right, from 1883, describes the features of a typical Matchett home, as do the two clippings below from 1885 and 1887.

His two-story homes rented for $20 a month. A typical three-story home was on a 16 by 72-foot lot with a cement floor in the basement and sold for $3800 (about $135,000 in 2026 dollars). Shown below is a photo of what some of those row homes look like today.

Bill’s three adult sons didn’t follow their father in construction, although one had a career in real estate. The oldest son died in 1894, the same year Lovey lost her battle with kidney disease. After they were buried beside his infant son, Bill purchased the monument shown above.

After he died his estate was appraised at $750,000, or over $28 million in today’s dollars. He left a simple will, dividing the entire estate among his eight remaining children. Nine of his eleven children are buried here at  Mount Moriah; seven of the nine are in the family plot in Section 12.