Posted on Aug. 26th 2008 by Justin Hopper
Community Connections documentarian Justin Hopper is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh
Garden Party: Ebensburg’s new Victorian look
There is a folktale that persists from the glory days of Ebensburg, PA - the late-19thcentury period when the small Cambria County town, 30 miles north of Johnstown, was
one of the jewels of Pennsylvania, used as a summer home and getaway for the robber
barons of Pittsburgh. The occasion was a wedding held by Ebensburg’s Phillips family world famous today for their collection of French Impressionist paintings. Looking over
the workers frantically preparing the garden, Mrs. Phillips announced from her porch,
“Cut the hedges low so that the natives may watch.”
Apocryphal, perhaps; historically plausible, no doubt. Walking through the doors of the
Cambria County Historical Society’s museum on Sunday, visitors encountered this
“folktale,” inscribed on a card and posted near the museum’s entrance, which is
appropriate, if tongue-in-cheek. It’s with a similar mission - though from a more populist
perspective - that the Society welcomed ‘the natives’ into the magnificent A.W. Buck
House that serves as their museum and office. There, scores of visitors were the first to
see a new exhibit of artifacts and interpretations of Ebensburg’s history, from the lofty
monogrammed place settings of the Ebensburg Inn to the helmets and blackened
textiles of the more recent “coal is king” days of Cambria County. And welcoming
visitors to the building was the carefully trimmed hedges of the site’s new Victorian-era
garden - recreated in detail from period photographs by Kendall-O’Brien, a Pittsburghbased firm of landscape architects with ties to Ebensburg, with help from a Community
Connections Grassroots grant.
The house was purchased by the Society in 1990 - after 50 years as a private home,
and 50 years as a convent. In 2000, a Keystone Grant allowed the group to redo the
house’s interior - and it shows, particularly in the spectacular music room, with its
refinished original floors, and in the stained-glass windows that face out of the sitting
room. But the house’s exterior remained staunchly 20th-century - an annoyance to an
organization intent on replication of their mandated era. (A stained-glass window, for
example, may soon be changing - a photo has emerged that may show the window’s
two parts were transposed at some point.)
“None of the [period] photos show the whole yard, but you get a good picture of it,” says
Historical Society Secretary Dave Huber. “But we have an etching of the house from
1890, [with] a lot of detail. There was a courtyard centerpiece, and the whole property
had a six-foot tall wrought-iron fence,” which the group has restored.
Much of the garden’s actual flora won’t be fully developed for at least a year or two, to
allow it to grow to its potential. But that centerpiece, the replaced courtyard, is there,
crowned with an arbor under which visitors now enter, and containing iron benches and
lawn urns. The effect is to move the focal point of the museum’s exterior to this
courtyard, and to provide it with an outdoor setting for visitors to gather. It also connects
the Buck House to Ebensburg’s downtown, just six blocks away.
“We really strived to tie this in to the recent downtown revitalization, which had a
Victorian theme,” says Huber. “Similar trees, similar iron work - we’re hoping that will
help lead people into the museum from downtown.”