The Lyon mansion at Pennsylvania Furnace, twenty-eight rooms of limestone on the county line

A tenth of a mile west of Route 45, just south of the Centre County line, stands an L-shaped house of native limestone about 50 by 70 feet, two and a half stories at its southeast end and a full four at the northwest. The five bay front is strictly symmetrical, with a paneled door framed by a transom and sidelights, and the symmetry of the southeast gable end is kept up with six false windows that read as closed shutters. John Lyon built it in 1834, and the National Register nomination says three generations of his family lived in its twenty-eight rooms.

The furnace it served began in 1813, when John Lyon, Jacob Haldeman and William Wallace set up a well capitalized iron furnace on the Huntingdon-Centre line, powered by Spruce Creek and named Pennsylvania Furnace. Africa's 1883 county history names the same three men and the same year. By 1820 it employed seventy men and made 1000 tons of pig iron a year, with Robert T. Stewart an owner alongside Lyon. Output rose to 1500 tons by the 1820s and to almost 2000 tons in later years. Pig iron made here went to the Sligo, Colerain or Tyrone forges for working into blooms, then to the Sligo Works at Pittsburgh for rolling. Steam machinery was added in 1856. It stopped in 1888.

Of the mines, timber lands, farms, schools, mills and housing that once made up the plantation, the survey behind the nomination found only the mansion and one outbuilding, a four door clapboard privy, with enough integrity to count. The house keeps its cast iron fireplace inserts and handmade hardware; the front porch dates from about 1920. The nomination calls it the largest and most architecturally detailed ironmaster's mansion in the county and lists it under Criteria A and C, industry and architecture, with a period of significance from 1834 to 1888.

Which county the furnace belonged to was argued over. The nomination quotes an 1826 Bellefonte writer who put the stack, nearly all the buildings, the ore bank and the coaling ground in Centre County, while the operation was taxed and counted by the census in Huntingdon County. The mansion, the nomination says, is clearly on the Huntingdon side. An early photograph of the furnace shows a signpost, perhaps marking the line, standing immediately in front of the stack.

The Pennsylvania Furnace or Lyon mansion is the largest of Huntingdon County's ironmaster's houses and one of the best preserved, retaining much of its Federal period detail, including cast iron fireplace inserts, hand-made hardware, and a transom and sidelights around the central door.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Pennsylvania Furnace Mansion (reference 90000409), Pennsylvania Furnace Mansion, section 8, p6 · character 7,088 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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