Cornwall and Lebanon Railroad Station

At first glance there is little to tie the Hewitts's flamboyant and aesthetic design to the industrial culture that paid for it. The jagged profile of the stepped Flemish gable ends and the overscaled fragments of classical ornament mark the dueling elements of Gothic and classical inherent in the Anglophile, Queen Anne style. If the dark brick and terra-cotta ornament look to historic sources, it is clear from the wheels and struts of the remarkable iron brackets that support the overhanging roofs of porches and porte-cochere that the Hewitts had learned to celebrate the industrial culture from their former partner Frank Furness. Handled with consummate grace and skill by the Hewitts, it might seem a vestige of one of Pennsylvania's great railroads. In fact, it represents the choice of Robert H. Coleman, founder in 1882 of a tiny seventeen-mile-long railroad that linked the great iron ore deposits of Cornwall to the Lebanon Iron Works with the tracks of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad. Coleman, head of the nearby Cornwall Iron Works that were soon to close, had already hired the same architects to ornament his estate with an immense Gothic Revival mansion (c. 1885; 1914 demolished). The south wing was added in 1912 to house the offices of the railroad shortly before it was acquired by the Pennsylvania Railroad.