Chanticleer

Adolph was a grandson of George Rosengarten, founder of Rosengarten & Sons, Chemical Manufacturers, and reputed to be one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia when he died in 1890. The firm became known as the Powers, Weightman & Rosengarten Co., of which both Adolph and his father, Harry, served as President. In 1927, the firm merged again and is better recognised today as the pharmaceutical giant, Merck & Co.  

In 1912, Adolph and Christine purchased a 7-acre property at Wayne-St. Davids about a mile-and-a-half off the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Adolph commissioned his friend and former classmate, Charles Louis Borie (1870-1943), to design their new summer home, which was completed the following year. Thomas Warren Sears (1880-1956) was the landscape architect who laid out the terraces "as extensions of the house". By 1924, they had enlarged the house and made it their permanent year-round home.   

The Rosengartens named their home "Chanticleer" (pronounced shon-te-clear) which is old French for "Rooster" but in English is synonymous with two literary classics: the Chanticleer is the proud and fierce rooster that rules the barnyard in "The Nun's Priest's Tale" from Chaucer's 14th Century Canterbury Tales; and, in 1855 it was the name given to the house in William Makepeace Thackeray's "The Newcomes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family".