An architect's house in Thornburg
In the beautiful Chartiers Valley, adjoining Crafton and Ingram, is to be built a new suburb to be called Thornburg. It is only four miles west of the Allegheny County Courthouse, and is reached by the cars of the West End Traction Co. in 28 minutes' ride from Fifth Avenue and Market Street ... Thornburg ... will have no superior in the vicinity of Pittsburgh; the beautiful location of the property and the many attractive features with which nature has endowed it, the close proximity to Pittsburgh and Allegheny, the perfect freedom from smoke and the fine transportation facilities, make this not only possible, but easy to accomplish ... When houses are built, they are required to be of brick or stone construction for at least the first story, and to cost not less than $2,500.
In 1899, Frank Thornburg (1856-1927) left his birthplace, Clinton, Iowa, and moved to Pittsburgh to develop a residential suburb on part of the 400-acre estate of his great-grandfather, Thomas Thornburg, located "in the beautiful Chartiers Valley ... four miles west of the Allegheny County Courthouse." Some 200 acres inherited by the children and grandchildren of Thomas' sons, Jacob, Thomas and Samuel, would be combined in July 1900 into the holdings of the Thornburg Land Co., under the direction of Frank and his cousin, David Thornburg.
Sales information had appeared nine months earlier in two October 1899 issues of Allegheny magazine. There were four photographs of the pristine site and two photographs of houses, one identified as "A Thornburg Residence," the other, "Residence to be Erected in Thornburg."
These images of "Thornburg residences" a year before any houses were built there are undoubtedly photographs Frank took of houses he admired as models for houses to be erected by the Thornburg Land Co. They illustrate his taste in residential architecture in 1899, and they are the only surviving examples of many such photographs. As Construction magazine subsequently reported, Thornburg homes "are patterned after houses in other cities, of which pictures were taken by Mr. Thornburg from time to time."
The photographs published in 1899 show broad roofs; shingle-covered ridges, dormers and turrets envelop second stories. First floors appear to be rough-cut stone. One house has a low gambrel (Dutch Colonial) roof, the other, a hipped roof. Both "models" sport diamond-pane windows. These houses may be characterized as Shingle Style, an adaptation of early American vernacular and Colonial forms that began in the 1870s in the northeast and spread across the country. The style gained renewed popularity in California in the 1890s. Frank often visited his mother and two sisters who lived in Los Angeles, and he photographed houses there. The model houses evoke Los Angeles houses by Hunt & Egar, Locke & Preston, F.L. Roehrig and Train & Williams. Their influence would not appear immediately, however.
The Architect
Under the direction of Frank Thornburg and architect S.T. McClarren there has grown up rapidly the most unique collection of houses near Pittsburgh. From the California mission with its cement walls to the English timbered cottage or the Swiss brick-and-shingle dwelling done all in one color, there are many varieties of the boulder residence, the cobblestone and rubblestone house with its pretty tile roof and the Gothic and Queen Anne type of residences. No house in Thornburg has a counterpart and the resulting dissimilarity is so unusual as to be very attractive to the home hunter.
If the homes of Thornburg were inspired by Frank's photographs, they were realized and adapted both structurally and aesthetically by his cousin, architect Samuel T. McClarren.
Samuel Thornburg McClarren was born Aug. 28, 1862, to Diana and William McClarren, then living on their farm in Findlay Township (McClaren Run Road marks a boundary and displays a variant spelling of the name). Samuel, the second son, was named after his mother's father, Samuel Thornburg. In 1883, the family moved to Walkers Mills, a hamlet west of Carnegie, Pa.
McClarren began his career in 1884 as a draftsman in the Pittsburgh firm of James P. Bailey. In 1888, at age 26, he established his own architectural practice.
Designs for 30 houses, three churches, two schools and one commercial building in Allegheny, Carnegie, McKeesport, Pittsburgh and New Cumberland, W.Va., are recorded between 1889 and 1899, and five of the houses and one church were illustrated in the Inland Architect and the American Architect and Building News.
One of the 1889 houses was designed for William Bell at 5170 Woodworth Ave., Bloomfield. McClarren married Katharine Bell (b. 1863) in 1892, and they lived in her father's house until they built their own family home in Thornburg (they had a son and two daughters).
An 1892 house for W.R. Ford in Shadyside combines Queen Anne gables and tower, a profusion of shingles and diamond-pane windows in a design with enough ideas for three or four houses - picturesque exuberance that would be tempered but not eradicated. The Ford and Bell houses and two others whose addresses are known are gone. McClarren's earliest known extant buildings are the John Morrow (1895) and Woolslair (1897) schools in Pittsburgh and the Husler Building (1896) in Carnegie, all influenced by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, H.H. Richardson's successor firm in Pittsburgh.
The first houses in Thornburg were erected in late 1900: five on the west side of Princeton Road (four survive today, including Frank's house at 1132 and David Thornburg's house at 1100), and Fred Sermin's house a block away at 1142 Dartmouth. Presumably, McClarren designed them as he and Frank were sharing an office in 1900. If so, they ignored the model houses of 1899 and erected modest, somewhat old-fashioned Queen Anne houses with steep triangular gables and dormers.
A Shingle Style House, 1901
McClarren erected his own house at Hamilton and Cornell about 1901. A 1904 photograph fuzzily survives on a microfilm of a deteriorating newspaper. The house has a high gambrel roof with the gable-end facing the street, a stone first story and shingle-covered upper stories. A large circular front porch is asymmetrically placed west of the entrance.
Elements of McClarren's house are found today at 1105 and 1109 Princeton Road. Gambrel roofs cover both houses; the former has a stone first story and the latter a deep semicircular porch. These houses, probably erected soon after McClarren's own, are almost certainly his design. The massing and the decorative elements remind us less of the 1899 model houses and more of 1880s Shingle-style designs of northeastern architects John Calvin Stevens and William Ralph Emerson.
On Nov. 21, 1905, the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph reported that a fire at 3 a.m. that day had destroyed the home of J. Eugene Beck in Thornburg:
Owing to the lack of a fire brigade or adequate water supply, the flames spread across the lawn to the residence of S.T. McClarren, No. 76 Hamilton Avenue ... The fire in the Beck residence aroused the family of S.T. McClarren, and all were able to leave in good time. The side of the house soon caught fire, and although a few pieces of furniture were carried out the remainder was destroyed, the house being burned to the ground.
Between Houses, 1902-1905
Frank Thornburg arrived home from Los Angeles, Cal., last Friday, after two months' absence. While away Mr. Thornburg ... secured 60 photographs of Los Angeles residences and intends reproducing most of the dwellings at Thornburg. The suburb is noted for its pretty homes, nearly all of which are patterned after houses in other cities, of which pictures were taken by Mr. Thornburg from time to time. The 60 new photographs are mostly of houses of the mission type and some are very artistic.
Thornburg's 1900 Queen Anne houses had been superseded by the Shingle style in 1902. Houses erected in 1903 tilted the stylistic envelope toward California and less traditional forms. Both Frank's second home at 501 Hamilton (Frank's daughter, Florence, called it "a copy of a California house") and Albert Daschbach's house at 1060 Stanford have low-hipped roofs with wide eaves, hipped dormers and horizontal massing. Inside, rooms flow into one another, and French doors lead to terraces and porches. House Beautiful described the Daschbach interior as designed:
A center hall is flanked on the right by the dining room and on the left by the living room, all three being thrown into one great room by wide openings ... Dark oak is the finish of the first floor, the sideboards in the dining room being built into the wall and a note of charm being imparted by two small bays. The "den" upstairs is also of oak, but the other rooms ... are finished in yellow pine. All floors are of hardwood ... The subdued tones of the wall papers harmonize well with the rich, brown oak woodwork and furniture to match.
A 1903 house for Conrad Pfohl at 1124 Cornell is Thornburg's first California-derived Spanish Mission building (two others would appear in 1908 and 1912).
McClarren also worked outside Thornburg. In 1904, he designed an addition to the Morrow School and in 1905 the First Presbyterian Church in Crafton (completed in 1907; demolished). By the fall of 1905, other architects - Joseph Neal and George Rowland, C.E. Willoughby and W.H. Charles - were designing residences in Thornburg. The community had grown to about 30 houses.After the November fire, McClarren built a temporary structure to shelter his family during the winter of 1905, and announced plans to build a second house in the spring of 1906.
A Craftsman House, 1906
The second house was built on the same site as the first. It seems likely that the fire influenced the design, since the core of the house is the hallway that divides the building at its midpoint and provides quick exit either east or west. The building flows outward and upward on either side of this center artery.
The first story is clad in brick. Long, thin, multitinted bricks are laid in an asymmetrical pattern called one-third running bond. The brick is "tapestry" brick, suggesting "a very old Oriental rug" in which "differing color values of the individual bricks ... are taken up and harmonized in the prevailing tone." The description is Louis Sullivan's, who used similar brick frequently after 1905.
The second story and attic are contained within a great triangular gable of stucco and wood framing that not only covers the entire house but extends beyond it toward the street. The grid of the wood trim is more geometric pattern than medieval form. Side, front and rear dormers extrude from the great gable and reinforce the triangular pattern.
The main entrance and the front of the house are encircled by a wall of large rough-cut stones that cradles the front porch and supports the base of the triangular roof as it cantilevers out toward the street. The stone piers and Richardsonian-scale arch shelter a picturesque indoor/outdoor garden room.
The main door on the east side of the house opens into the entrance hall. This narrows into a hallway through the center of the house, past the stairway to the upstairs rooms and out the side door on the west side.
The living room fills the front half of the house. Wood bands border and trisect the ceiling. Three large windows look onto the porch, while two diamond-pane windows light either side of a fireplace with a brown tile surround and built-in bookshelves. A band of small windows on the opposite wall provides light and privacy.
The spacious, well-lit living room opens into the hall and through it to the dining room, which shares the back half of the first floor with the kitchen on one side and a morning room and a sun porch on the other. The living room, dining room and hall form a spacious "L" that can be closed off into separate spaces by two unusual pocket doors on either side of the hall. Each outsized sliding door is approximately 6 1/2 feet by 8 feet; three rows of 9-inch panes of clear glass at the top allow light to enter, even when the doors are closed.The dining room has a built-in china cabinet under large windows overlooking the back yard and an elegant wooden fireplace mantel with 18th-century detailing and a green-glazed tile surround (characteristic of fireplace designs by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow).
If one compares Thornburg houses with the 1899 house photographs - or, for that matter, with photographs of turn-of-the-century houses in California, the Midwest and the East - a conviction, derived equally from the buildings themselves, is confirmed: McClarren's house designs are interpretations, not reproductions.
The inventive yet practical plan, and the artful use of materials in McClarren's 1906 home, places it within the family of American Arts and Crafts or Craftsman houses, a term popularized by a leading proponent of the movement, Gustav Stickley. Stickley's magazine, The Craftsman, publicized his and his contemporaries' efforts to create an indigenous American residential architecture. In Thornburg - inspired by wonderful (and improbable) infusions of southern California architecture - McClarren blended imported ingredients with southwestern Pennsylvania's vernacular forms and Richardsonian legacy to create a residential architecture attuned to the regional landscape and climate.
Nowhere is that regional character more apparent than in the third and final house McClarren designed in 1907 for Frank at 1132 Lehigh Road. This massive shingle and stone "mansion" - southwestern Pennsylvania's finest American Arts and Crafts house - would not be quite as at home in southern California as it is here.
Changes to McClarren's house have been minor - primarily painted woodwork. The current owner has cared for the house for over two decades, and future changes will be in keeping with its character.
In 1909, the Thornburg Land Co. declared bankruptcy, and the borough of Thornburg was established. Frank moved to Los Angeles in 1911. A year or two later, the McClarren family moved to St. Petersburg, Fla.
In 1917, Thornburg's oldest resident, Charley Treat, reminisced:
When Sam wasn't architectin' he was playing the cornet. Some cornettist Sam was. In the long warm summer evenings Ed and Charley used to set out on the front porch in their suspenders and slippers and listen to Sam playin' "The Fatal Wedding with Variations." But Sam broke the plate of his front teeth and the town remained as quiet as ever.
The residential suburb planned by Frank Thornburg and designed by his cousin is now the Thornburg National Register Historic District, designated 1982. The "town" is still quiet, and the view from the porch where Sam McClarren played his cornet is still dominated by the remarkable houses he designed.
Albert M. Tannler is the historical collections director of the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, and a free-lance writer for the Tribune-Review.
