Sunbrook Farm

This idyllic farm complex includes a large, yellow brick Colonial Revival house c. 1897 at the top of the hill, with an adjacent gambrel-roofed carriage house, and a smaller Shingle Style cottage nearby. Below, on the flat land along the creek, the original farmhouse of 1795, incrementally added to in 1825 and the 1930s, adjoins a spectacular barn and matching outbuildings. This is a combination of three farms, one from the eighteenth and two from the nineteenth centuries, which were made into a summer estate for John Lloyd Sr. by the Beezer twins. Lloyd was president of a litany of local businesses, including the Altoona and Logan Valley Electric Railway, the First National Bank of Altoona, and the Allegheny Water Company, whose water source was three springs on the Sunbrook farm property; and he had strong financial ties to the PRR and its president Alexander Cassatt. The deeds were in Caroline B. Lloyd's name, and her name is on the drawing of the afore-mentioned Colonial Revival house in the 1897 architectural catalog of Beezer Brothers' Altoona work.

Lloyd bought four hundred acres from three farms between 1880 and 1890, and asked the architects to glamorize the barns adjacent to the older four-bay, red brick house. In 1900, the timber-frame barn, originally covered with vertical siding still visible inside, was covered with horizontal siding painted yellow to match the yellow brick of the Lloyd house at the top of the hill. The more fashionable horizontal siding, round-arched vents, and charming rooftop ventilators made the farm a showplace. Now painted white with green trim, the weight of the extra siding, slate roof, and added gabled wall dormers, in combination with a persistent snow one winter, nearly destroyed the barn. It was repaired by an Amish crew from Bellville. An icehouse and railroad station have been demolished, but a springhouse, machine shed, corn crib, milk house, goat shed, and hay shed survive.