Joseph Pawling Estate

The Pawling Estate is an example of English landscape architecture traditions in a predominantly German farming community. In the 1790s, Joseph Pawling, an English resident of Chester County, relocated to a farm in Penn Township. About 1820, his son, Samuel, constructed a two-family house with bricks fired in a kiln on the property. The sixbay Georgian mansion has double gable-end chimneys and a dozen nine-over-six windows on the facade and Palladian attic windows. The arched entranceway with sidelights and a fanlight above the paneled door leads to an open spiral staircase. Occupied by Pawling's heirs for 150 years, the interior has formal fireplaces on the first and second floors and an open-hearth stone fireplace in the original basement kitchen. On the spring-fed east side of the house, stone walls enclose a large formal garden of native and imported shrubbery landscaped with stone steps, arches, and a rose-covered wooden pagoda. On the west side, a bank barn was erected with huge oldgrowth hewn timbers on a fieldstone foundation.