The Eli Slifer House, Lewisburg, PA

The Eli Slifer House, Lewisburg, PA. 1861. Source: otandka

Source: Bill Badzo

Source: Wikimedia

Eli Slifer commissioned Samuel Sloan to design his country house in Lewisburg, completed in 1861, just as the Civil War was breaking out in which Slifer played a major role as a bigwig in state government. In this house, we can see Sloan moving somewhat away from all of his precedents and into more creative territory in design. While the plan and first two floors look like most of Sloan's five bay symmetrical plan houses, such as the Packer house, to which this bears some similarity, above the roof, Sloan has raised the roof pitch dramatically to accommodate tall central gables. An additional oddity is the placement of the tower in the rear, invisible from the front unless one stands at just the right angle to see its steeply pitched tent roof poking out. So emphatic is the right side of the house, that it almost becomes a principal façade in competition with the main façade. The design of the house is rather spare, with no window surrounds, though this would appear much less cheerless if the shutters were restored. The façade as well seems to have been faced in fine stone, now obscured by a rather rough plaster job. The front of the house features a simple porch that extends around the design, very much a Sloan standby which softens the mass of the main body and expands the profile. The central window is paired with a curved wooden awning over it, uniting the two. The dramatic gable, with paired tombstone windows, has bargeboards, decorative wooden boards attached to the cornice, with a few whimsies thrown in for drama. The simple beam brackets are mostly obscured by the angled eave overhang. The right side features a large fringed second floor balcony, perhaps the frilliest thing on this mostly somber design. The tower's curved roof is a feature that hearkens back to an earlier stage of Italianate, with balconies and triple arched windows. In a sense, one might consider the placement of this tower along side the rear towers found in Woodland Terrace.

Sloan published his design for this house in Homestead Architecture, as Design 33.

After serving as a religious institution for many years, the house is now a museum. On their website is a gallery of interior images, which indicate the house seems appropriately furnished for its period.