Pennypacker Mills

Hours

Open Tuesday – Saturday: 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Sunday: 1 p.m. – 4 p.m.

The Experience

A tour of this colonial-revival mansion brings back early 20th-century middle-class living, but harkens to America’s glorious colonial past. Oil portraits, redware, scenic wallpaper and family antiques are mindful of the colonial era, but incorporated into an updated 1900 home.

Rooms harbor exquisite Victorian accoutrements, including children’s toys, and many facets of Pennsylvania history. The sprawling country estate is adjacent to the Perkiomen Creek with a landscape designed by Thomas Meehan & Sons in 1901.

History

Farming and milling became a way of life here for the original landowner Hans Jost Heijt in the early 1700s. Ancestors of Pennsylvania Governor Samuel Pennypacker bought the property in 1747 and owned it when Gen. Washington used Pennypacker Mills as headquarters in 1777. By 1903 Gov. Pennypacker, his wife Virginia and their children, used it as their summer home.

Originally constructed about 1720, the mansion at Pennypacker Mills was redesigned and enlarged by architect Arthur Brockie in 1901.