While searching for a topic this month, I came across a set of 1939 photographs at the Library of Congress showing a gracious Edgmont home called Lane’s End, then the residence of Mrs. Rodgers Denckla. The name didn’t ring a bell, but curiosity led me down a winding path that ended in this article.
Katherine Norwood Rodgers married Christian Paul Denckla in 1932. The couple lived happily ever after—for about four years. His family had owned the Lane’s End property in Edgmont, but she received it in the divorce settlement. She kept his name, since they had two children, and continued to appear in the Society pages as Mrs. Rodgers Denckla for the rest of her long life.
A 1939 newspaper noted that she and her children had spent the winter with her parents in Switzerland but were returning home, and “upon their arrival in America they will occupy their home, Lane’s End, at Edgmont.” The 1940 census confirms her residence there with her two
children and two servants.
Katherine “Kay” Denckla had the travel bug. She summered at exclusive Watch Hill, Rhode Island—where Taylor Swift now owns a mansion—and wintered in Santa Barbara. Later, she was described as “of Southampton, L.I., and Hobe Sound, Florida,” as well as Rittenhouse Square. When she remarried in 1948, she and her husband planned to live in Palm Beach. They divorced three years later, and she moved to Southampton, where she rented her guest house to Baron Guy de Rothschild for the first half of one summer and to the Countess de Romanones for the second. Kay lived at exclusive addresses throughout her life. Edgmont was in good company.
Turning back to the house itself: on the 1911 Edgmont map, the same property appears under the name of Francis V. Lloyd, an attorney from a prominent Philadelphia family. By 1930, it had passed to Paul Denckla, and then to Kay after the divorce. In the mid-1940s, the estate was sold to Donald Byers Barrows and Anna Newbold Barrows, who used it as their country home until about 1963, when they sold it for development as the Edgmont Country Club…