Preserving a Rich History

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A visit to Colerain Forges Mansion places an individual in a picturesque setting of ferns

and pines, but more than 200 years ago what would be Colerain today was the center of a

thriving iron industry in the Spruce Creek valley.

Today's 10 acres that Colerain Forges Mansion sits on was part of an almost 400-acre tract of land that was warranted and patented by Richard Ricketts in 1786. At that time, this area was still Tyrone Township, Bedford County. Ricketts was a land speculator and began dividing up the land into smaller lots. In 1790, Ricketts sold roughly about 100 acres to Shadrock Tipton. In the taxes for Franklin Township, Shadrock Tipton had a sawmill. Quite possibly, this could be the first structure built on the mansion’s current property.

In 1792, Tipton sold the land to Samuel Marshall, a young entrepreneur who migrated to America in 1790 from Ireland and moved out to Huntingdon County. He formed a partnership with John Walker and built a tavern, a distillery, a store and grist mill. By 1814, they also built a forge. In an 1801 advertisement, Marshall advertised to sell the property. The advertisement described the property at the time, a key feature being a 28-by-28 neatly-framed house. This house is the front right section of the Colerain Forges Mansion. The area that surrounds the mansion was called Marshall’s Mill. Marshall would become the postmaster of the first post office in the Spruce Creek Valley. In the years that it stood by itself, his house would go on to be tenanted by several families. Most notably, David Rittenhouse Porter, the ninth Governor of Pennsylvania, lived there before starting his political career.

After the War of 1812, the iron industry declined, affecting many of the forges along the Spruce Creek. Samuel Marshall’s forge and the Sligo forges downstream owned by William Patton went up for sheriff sale. In 1818, John Lyon and Robert Sterwart, the owners of nearby Pennsylvania Furnace, purchased Marshall’s Forge, and the two Sligo Forges. Lyon and Stewart consolidated the three forges into one business. By 1821, the three forges were renamed Colerain Forges. Stewart was the new ironmaster for Colerain Forges, and building records indicate that the center section of the house was built at this time. In 1828, Stewart moved to Pittsburgh to build and manage the Sligo Iron Works, the manufacturing facility for iron plate and iron bars formed from the iron blooms produced by Colerain Forges.

In 1831, David Stewart, the manager of Pennsylvania Furnace, half brother to Robert Stewart and brother-in-law to John Lyon, became Colerain Forges’ new ironmaster. He moved his growing family into the mansion and began building additions, expanding it into the structure we see today. Colerain Forges Mansion became the center of an iron-producing community. This community would have included housing for the forge employees, a grist mill, store, post office, school and a church. Most of these structures do not exist anymore, but a few still stand as local homes. Many other structures' foundations are beneath the mansion’s lawns. At the height of Colerain Forges’ operation, the company owned more than 4,000 acres of land and was part of a larger enterprise, Lyon, Shorb and Company, one of the nation’s largest iron-producing companies. From 1823 to 1860,Colerain produced 29,616 tons of wrought iron blooms. An iron bloom was a spongy mass of iron, slag and charcoal made from iron ore in a bloomery furnace. Weighing up to 10 pounds or more, blooms were then forged and hammered to remove impurities and create wrought iron. During the Civil War, Colerain Forges iron was used to build Union monitor gunboats.

David Stewart died in 1869 at age 76. After Colerain Forges closed in 1874, the mansion became the Stewart family’s residence where his daughters, Margaretta and Catherine, lived until Margaretta’s death in 1919. Throughout this period, Miss Maggie and Miss Kate were renowned for their hospitality as the mansion became a center for music and the arts. The older sister, Miss Kate played the piano in the Great Room for guests, and her sheet music still sits near the keys.

After Miss Maggie's death, the mansion went to Ben Everhart, a local farmer who purchased the mansion in 1920 and turned it into a farm house servicing a working farm. In 1943, Louise Olds McMahon, an attorney from Manhattan with ties to the area, purchased the mansion. She started its renovation and began many local traditions, such as handing out oranges at Christmas and baking cookies for an end-of-the-summer celebration, which a few residents of the area still remember attending as children. McMahon passed the mansion on to her daughter, Nancy Pekruhn, and son-in-law, John Pekruhn, an architecture professor at Carnegie Mellon University. 

In 1988, the Pekruhns sold the house to Dorothy Gray Gurney, a law professor and author from California. Gurney, who wrote “Women of the West,” a seminal account of 19th-century frontier women, was a pioneer in the fields of historic preservation and environmental protection, working her entire legal career to save important culture and environmental resources. Her husband, Hartley Gurney, worked by her side as a partner until his death in 2006. Together, they restored the mansion so that each room reflected the time period of its heyday from the 1820s hearth kitchen to the 1840s Great Room. In 1990, the mansion was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. According to the National Park Service, it is one of the few remaining ironmasters' homes which “retains its integrity of location, design setting, materials, feeling and association.”

Dorothy passed away in January 2022. Before her health began to seriously decline,she worked with her family to establish the Colerain Center for Education, Preservation, and the  Arts as a 501c3 non-profit Foundation to honor the historic legacy of this property. In 2019, she donated the mansion and its grounds to the Colerain Center so it could be open to the public as a resource for events and educational programs celebrating the rich history of the region.

Dave Petit

Colerain Center Executive Director

Sources:

Bedford County land warrants

Huntingdon County Deed records

Huntingdon County tax records

History of Huntingdon & Blair County, J. Simpson Africa, 1883

North American Family Histories 1500-2000

Huntingdon Gazette

Lancaster Intelligencer