Preserving the Legacy: Lynnewood Hall's Journey from Neglect to Restoration

Lynnewood Hall is a 110,000-square-foot, 110-room Neoclassical Revival Gilded Age estate left to the elements for decades. Designed by Horace Trumbauer, construction finished in 1900. It was the home of Peter Widener, who made his fortune through a variety of business endeavors, including supplying mutton to the Union Army during the Civil War, building streetcar lines, and being a founding member of U.S. Steel and the American Tobacco Company. Widener is regarded as one of the 100 richest Americans. Widener’s oldest son and his grandson both died during the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Three years later, Peter Widener passed away at Lynnewood in 1915. Widener’s famous art collection, consisting of over 2,000 works by painters and sculptors, including Rembrandt, Donatello, Vermeer, Sargent, and Raphael, was donated in 1940 to the National Gallery of Art, where many are currently on display.

The estate had several different owners in the following decades, including the Faith Theological Seminary, who purchased it for $192,000 in 1952. It was sold to First Korean Church in 1996, after which the building was mostly vacant and barely maintained.

As the largest surviving Gilded Age estate in the Philadelphia region, it has long been hoped that the mansion would somehow be saved and restored. For decades, the prospects seemed bleak, with many fearing it would meet the same fate as Whitemarsh Hall, another Gilded Age mansion of similar size destroyed in 1980.

The nonprofit Lynnewood Hall Preservation Foundation purchased the building for $9 million in 2023 with the hopes of restoring the grounds and hall and making them accessible to the public. Currently, it is cared for by a small but dedicated and passionate cadre of preservationists on the staff and board, who are working to make the building a beacon for art, education, and history that can be enjoyed for generations to come.