Did Anyone Ever Actually Live in This Mansion Morrison Mansion

According to legend, Webb Horton built this massive mansion in New York, but never actually spent a night inside. But perhaps the legend is just that, folklore about a mysterious Victorian era mansion on a hilltop. Let's get to the bottom of it. Hi everyone, Ken here, hit that subscribe button, and let's explore this house. In 1826, Webb Horton was born in Delaware County, New York, in the rolling timber country of the Catskill Mountains. In the middle decades of the 19th century, the Catskills in the northern reaches of Pennsylvania possessed something the booming American economy desperately wanted. Vast hemlock forests blanketed the hills, and their bark, ground, and fresh water produced the tannic acid that turned rawhide into sole leather for the boots and harnesses of an industrializing nation. In 1864, Webb Horton and his brother Walter arrived in the Sheffield wilderness of northwestern Pennsylvania and began buying up hemlock forest land by the thousand-acre plot. Three years later, the brothers consolidated their operations under the name Horton, Quarry, and Company, which would eventually control multiple tanneries. Sheffield, a sleepy crossroads in Warren County, became one of the great leather-producing centers of the United States, and Webb Horton became one of its kings. Then came the second piece of luck. Underneath the Pennsylvania forests his company had bought for their bark lay another resource entirely. Sheffield sat squarely within the original Pennsylvania oil region, opened up after the Drake Well of 1859, and Horton's land happened to be in the right place at the right moment. The tannery king became briefly, and profitably, an oilman as well. In 1853, his Horton, Quarry, and Company was rolled into the giant United States Leather Company, the so-called Tannery Trust, capitalized at $130 million upon its formation. That figure represented the largest book value of any corporation in the United States at the time. When the Dow Jones Industrial Average was launched on May 26, 1896, United States leather was one of its original twelve components, an indication of how completely Horton's business had been absorbed into the central machinery of the American economy. By the 1880s, with his fortune well-established, Horton had relocated to Middletown, New York. He and his wife and his children settled into an existing frame house on South Street, and over the next two decades, they quietly bought up the surrounding parcels. In the autumn of 1901, when Webb Horton was already 75 years old, ground was broken for the house that would become his monument. The cornerstone was laid formally in 1903, and construction would then drag on for four more years. The family moved in around 1906, while the interior was still being finished, and the work was finally completed in 1907. From the first shovel to the final carved leaf, the project reportedly cost exactly $1 million, equivalent to roughly $35 million today. The mansion's designer was a local man named Frank J. Lindsay. He was a Middletown carpenter who had turned to architect, the sort of self-taught designer who flourished in small American cities during the Victorian era. What Lindsay and his client produced was an exuberant, late-Victorian mashup. The massive masonry walls and rugged surface texture carried the imprint of the Richardsonian Romanesque, the style Henry Hobson Richardson had made fashionable in the 1880s for serious civic and commercial buildings. The complex, hipped and dormer roofline, with its picturesque conical caps and bristling chimneys, leans towards the Queen Anne. The carved cartouches, the egg-and-tart moldings, the Corinthian piers, and the swags of fruit and foliage belong to the classical vocabulary of the Beaux-Arts, a truly eclectic confection. The exterior is composed of load-bearing walls of rock-faced marble tied back into a steel frame. Inside, the plan is conservative and beautifully made. All three principal stories follow a central hall arrangement, an old American convention dressed in turn-of-the-century finery. The main entry leads to a paneled vestibule, and then into the central hall itself. To the south of the hall lie the major reception rooms, a circular salon and a St. Oak library, linked through wide pocket doors and both lavishly modeled with a rococo plaster relief on the ceilings. The stair itself is the slow, theatrical climb of a Gilded Age house. A few mahogany steps lead up from the west side of the hall to the portcouchere vestibule, and then a long flight, also of mahogany, ascends past the Tiffany window to the second floor. There the balustrade resolves into a graceful curve, executed not in mahogany but in Circassian walnut, a richly figured wood prized in the era for its swirling grain. Now, Webb Horton did not get to enjoy his masterpiece for long, if at all. He passed away in 1908 at the age of 82. Local tradition holds that he never spent a single night in the finished mansion. Some accounts soften the claim, noting that the family had moved into the house by 1906 while the interior was still being completed, but the legend has the deeper hold on local memory. His wife, who had been by his side through the Catskill Tannerys, the Pennsylvania Timberlands, and the Middletown construction site, outlived him by nearly a decade, passing away in 1917. None of the Horton children had married, and none had left descendants. The family that had built the great house was simply gone. Eugene Horton, the couple's son who passed away in the midst of the Spanish Flu, left the estate to his first cousin and long-time employee, John Horton Morrison. Morrison was a farmer who took up his unexpected inheritance with reluctance, moved his family into the mansion in the fall of 1918, and proceeded to do as little as possible to change it. For nearly three decades, he and his wife Christine lived gently in the great house, leaving the woodwork and the Tiffany glass essentially untouched. When John Horton Morrison died in 1946, the second great twist in the property story arrived. His will granted Christine the right to use the estate for her lifetime, but specified that on her death it should pass to Horton Hospital, the Middletown institution that had also been named for Webb Horton. Christine, however, had a different idea. In the late 1940s, Orange County educators and civic leaders had begun planning what would become the first county-sponsored community college in the State University of New York system, and they needed a campus. In 1950, the new Orange County Community College opened its doors to a charter class, with first-year tuition set at $200. The mansion became its first administrative and academic building, and was renamed to Morrison Hall. In the decades since, the house has been remarkably well treated. SUNY Orange has consistently described the mansion as the architectural centerpiece of its Middletown campus. There is something fitting in the fact that the Webb Horton house has spent more of its life as a public institution than it ever did as a private home. The man who built it had no surviving heirs to enjoy it, and what might easily have become a white elephant was instead handed over for the use of thousands of students a year. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. What did you like best about this mansion? Let me know down below in the comment section and while you're there, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an exciting episode of This House.