Curtin Mansion

This stately mansion was constructed in 1830-31 for ironmaster Roland Curtin and his family. Its exterior walls are composed of local limestone. The building was designed in the Federal style popular in America during the period 1780-1840. It features 15 rooms of equal dimensions, with five on each floor, connected by a wide central hallway. The mansion was occupied by five generations of the Curtin family from 1831 through 1951. After the last occupants moved out in 1951, the building began to deteriorate. In 1968 it was conveyed to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC). Restoration overseen by the PHMC in 1971-72 returned the mansion to its condition in the 1850s, the heyday of Eagle Iron Works and Curtin Village. The mansion has been furnished with mid-nineteenth-century pieces, and is periodically open to the public for guided tours conducted by volunteer docents under the supervision of the non-profit Roland Curtin Foundation for the Preservation of Eagle Furnace. Updates are posted on the Foundation's Facebook home: https://www.facebook.com/CurtinVillage.

Eagle Iron Works and Curtin Village formed the hub of a 900-acre iron plantation employing as many as 200 full- and part-time workers annually throughout much of its 112 years of operation. Founded in 1810 when Irish immigrant Roland Curtin Sr. and Cumberland County native Moses Boggs established Eagle Forge along Bald Eagle Creek downstream from Milesburg, the charcoal-fueled and water-powered Iron Works was expanded through the addition of Eagle Furnace in 1818 (a mile southwest of Eagle Forge), a rolling mill near Eagle Furnace in 1830, and Pleasant Furnace beside Eagle Forge in 1848. Following his purchase of a gristmill tract beside Eagle Forge in 1825, Roland Curtin (by then the Works’ sole proprietor) began laying out a workers’ village on the European model, with single-family cabins arranged around an oblong village green. Just east of this “Curtin Village” Roland erected an elegant ironmaster’s mansion for himself and his large family in 1830-31. Upon his retirement in 1848 and return to Bellefonte (where he died in 1850), several of his sons took over the business, which they and their descendants managed with uneven success until fire destroyed the Pleasant Furnace complex in 1921, leading to the closure of Eagle Forge the following year. In its final days, Eagle Iron Works featured the last operating cold-blast charcoal furnace in Pennsylvania. Restoration and reproduction efforts beginning in 1971 give visitors rare views into the lives and labors of central Pennsylvanians who helped propel the region into the forefront of American iron production in the early decades of the 19th century.

Eagle Iron Works and Curtin Village Self-Guided Walking Tour. Brochure produced in 2019 by the Roland Curtin Foundation for the Preservation of Eagle Furnace, Inc.