Father Pitt in Sharon

Author: Father Pitt

Stevenson Mansion

This is one of the most extravagant mobile homes in history. John Stevenson was an executive in the New Castle Nail and Wire Company, which obviously brought him a lot of money. He hired New Castle’s own Sydney Foulk to design this extravagant Romanesque house, which cost $100,000 to build in 1894.

Not long after, he came back from a trip to Europe to find that the company had been absorbed by United States Steel, and there was no place for him in the new organization. He was so angry he stomped out of New Castle—and took his house with him, in kit form, every stone labeled for reassembly, on 55 railcars. It cost another $100,000 to move the house, but he showed them.

Comments

February 24, 2026
Jefferson Avenue School

The date stone tells us this school was built in 1909. The architect was Sharon’s own Edward J. Weaver. It now serves as the office of the Mercer County Housing Authority.

Comments

February 24, 2026
Charles H. Wiltsie House

This flamboyantly eclectic house was designed by Sharon’s own E. E. Clepper; it was built in 1910 for the manager of a hardware and construction firm. By big-city standards, Mr. Clepper’s style was about twenty years behind the times; but Mr. Wiltsie certainly got a distinctive house, and the details are unusually well preserved.

Comments

February 24, 2026
Three Houses on Highland Road

Highland Road runs through a neighborhood of high-class houses put up in the 1920s or thereabouts. Here are three of them. Above and below, two approaches to the increasingly popular Colonial Revival.

The exceptionally fine Georgian mansion above, according to the Sharon Historical Society’s “Roaring Twenties” tour, was designed by “Wolfe & Wolfe of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.” That would be the father-and-son team of T. B. and Lawrence Wolfe, who designed many millionaires’ mansions and distinguished churches in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area.

Here is a house with Tudor half-timbering that is a good representative of what old Pa Pitt calls the Fairy-Tale Style, where historical accuracy is abandoned and the priority is making the house look like an illustration of an ideal house in a children’s book.

Comments

February 24, 2026
Colonial Revival House on Highland Road

A frame Colonial that has been updated with fake siding and shutters, and perhaps stripped of a front porch, but still makes an attractive sight along the street. It was up for sale when old Pa Pitt passed by, so if you hurry…

Comments

February 24, 2026