Allegedly built around 1840, the William B. Dunlap Mansion stood at 1298 Market Street in Bridgewater, Pennsylvania. In January of 2017, it was demolished.
The Dunlap Mansion was familiar to many Beaver County residents and a petition to save the house circulated months prior to the demolition date. But the site was in disrepair and a court order had been secured to tear it down. Between fifteen and twenty people watched as 180-year-old walls were knocked to the ground.
I was eighteen years old when the Dunlap Mansion was demolished. Like many kids in the Beaver area, I had snuck inside the dilapidated old house, but had never known anything more about it. Now, the Dunlap Mansion is the perfect subject for my studies in place, memory, and digital reconstruction. In preparation for a larger project, I hope to research and digitally recreate the Dunlap Mansion as it existed in 2017. Throughout the project, I will post updates on my blog (tagged #dunlapproject) talking about the process, challenges, and progress of the research and reconstruction.
See the blog posts here.
This project is being done with support from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
