The Lyon Mansion at Pennsylvania Furnace

The Historic American Engineering Record's photographs of the ironmaster's mansion at Pennsylvania Furnace carry survey number HAER PA-286-A and a cover sheet with no history of its own. The written record sits in the parent survey of the furnace, HAER PA-286, edited by Gray Fitzsimons and Kenneth Rose as part of the documentation project begun in 1987 that produced the county inventory.

That survey says a partnership of John Lyon, Jacob Haldeman and William Wallace established the furnace in 1813 on the Huntingdon and Centre county line, with water power from Spruce Creek. By 1820 it employed seventy men and made 1,000 tons of pig iron a year. Lyon kept his strongest interest here and in 1834 built the twenty-eight-room mansion, which three generations of his family lived in.

The surveyors describe an L-shaped house of native limestone, roughly 70 by 50 feet, rising from two and a half stories on the east end to four full stories on the west. The five-bay front is strictly symmetrical, with a paneled door framed by a transom and sidelights and three gable-roofed dormers; the east gable keeps its symmetry with six false windows that read as closed shutters. The front porch on stone piers dates from about 1920. The survey calls the house the largest of the county's ironmaster's houses and one of the best preserved, with cast-iron fireplace inserts and hand-made hardware still in place, and points readers to student drawings of the house, HABS PA-611, which its source list dates to 1962. It also records a county line argument: an 1826 Bellefonte writer claimed the stack and nearly all the buildings lay in Centre County, while tax rolls and the census consistently placed the works in Huntingdon County.

J. Simpson Africa's 1883 history adds the family. It says John Lyon married a sister of David Stewart, the Dauphin County man who came to Pennsylvania Furnace as manager and became a part owner, and that their son George W. Lyon was the resident partner of the furnace company, living in the mansion when the book was written. The survey says steam machinery was added in 1856 and the furnace stopped in 1888.

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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