I decided to go to the 'Seven Tours of Historic Philadelphia'
website to see what the city near me had to offer. I ended up choosing the
Fairmount Park tour. I chose this one because it was a name that sounded
familiar to me, but yet I didn't know what it had to offer. I soon was to
find out that Fairmount Park is a beautiful landscape filled with
fascinating knowledge. The tour started out from the historic beginning.
Through the entire tour, an overview map of the Park was provided at the
top of the screen to provide a sense of where we would be heading and where
things were relatively located. From the get-go I was given a complete
overview of Fairmount; how it was placed on the beautiful Schuylkill River
and is the Largest landscaped park in the United States.

To begin the tour, our first stop was actually out of the way of
the main route we would be taking; so as to get a start on things. The
first sight was the Rower Statue(the first of many statues to come), where
I learned a little bit about Grace Kelly and Her Dad. So has it that '
there was an amusing remark making the rounds in 1956 when Grace Kelly
married Prince Rainier of Monaco that her father's domain (John B. Kelly,
Sr., was president of the Fairmount Park Commission) was larger than her
husband's. Indeed, the Principality of Monaco covers only .6 square miles,
but the 4,077.59 acres of Fairmount Park extend over 6 square miles.' The
road we would be taking was, thusly, called Kelly Drive.

The tour then begun at the Philadelphia Art Museum, home of
hundreds of phenomenal artwork displays. Here, I saw the sculpture of Joan
of Arc, in which I found out a kind of interesting story. I found out that
Joan died at 19 years old when she was burned at the stake. Coincidently,
to make this statue, the 15 year old model Valerie Laneau was burned to
death later in life as well. We then stopped at the Fountain of the Sea
Horses, directly behind the museum in the garden. It was a replica of the
Borghese Gardens in Rome. Around the museum, I also saw the statue of John
Paul Jones along with other heroically cast revolutionaries; the
Waterworks, a grand architectural achievement, the Lincoln Monument; and
Lemon Hill, an estate owned by Robert Morris, Declaration signer and major
financier of Revolution.

The tour then continued on to the Boathouse Row, a place I wish I
could have actually seen with my own eyes. It has a Victorian aspect and
supposedly is a very enchanting sight at night with all the lights on the
water. We then stopped to see many statuettes such as the Icelandic
Sculpture, Garfield by Saint-Gaudens, the Playing Angels, and the Samuel
Memorial. Here the Samuel Memorial provided different stages of our
development as a nation. The first part contained historic quotations with
larger-than-lifesize statues of 'The Revolutionary Soldier,' 'The
Statesman,' 'The Quaker' and 'The Puritan.' Next was 'The Preacher,' 'The
Miner,' 'The Slave,' and 'The Immigrant;' here, in which quotations from
Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant were engraved. Lastly ...