Luke Swetland, one of the original Connecticut settlers, built a two-story single-pile house, comprising one room on the ground floor with a large stone fireplace along one wall. As the family prospered, he and his sons added three bays to create a commodious clapboarded central-hall house with fashionable Federal details. Eventually, a separate summer kitchen and shed were joined to the main house. The result is an intriguing artifact of Yankee building ways, while the interior rooms illustrate changes in living and cooking spaces as the nation moved from an agrarian to an industrialized society. Boxy and simple, with little ornament apart from its fanlighted door surrounds, it suggests the stylistic conservatism of the Wyoming Valley well into the nineteenth century. The house was restored in 1999 by Frens and Frens and is operated as a museum by the Luzerne County Historical Society.
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Swetland Homestead
Data
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Location: Wyoming, PennsylvaniaRegional Overviews:Styles:Materials:
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Citation
George E. Thomas, "Swetland Homestead", [Wyoming, Pennsylvania], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/PA-02-LU44.
Print Source
Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania, George E. Thomas, with Patricia Likos Ricci, Richard J. Webster, Lawrence M. Newman, Robert Janosov, and Bruce Thomas. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012, 475-475.
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