Indiana Township
Hartwood Acres
County park and mansion, Indiana Township
Hartwood is a county park on Saxonburg Boulevard, in Indiana and Hampton townships: a stone Tudor house, stables, a formal garden, and 629 acres of woods and bridle trails. Mary Flinn Lawrence built it with money from her father, William Flinn, a state senator and a contractor. She and her husband, John Lawrence, asked Alfred Hopkins to take the design from a manor they had seen in the Cotswolds. Work began in 1927. The house, 31 rooms around a great hall, was finished in 1929. The stable stalls are varnished oak. A Steinway from 1901 had been her father’s gift on her sixteenth birthday.
John Lawrence died in 1945. In 1969 the county bought the place from Mary, about 400 acres with the house, on terms she set. She and the people who worked for her could stay until she died. The land would not be divided. The county would also take her sister Edith’s farm, Harkaway, now the ground where the concerts are held. She died at the house on 29 October 1974. The park opened to the public in 1976. The furnishings had been bought with the house, so the rooms are still as she kept them. The grounds are open. The house is open as a museum on a schedule.
A woman is said to stand in an upstairs window, and people say she is Mary. In October 2006 the Post-Gazette asked Sylvia Easler, superintendent of recreation for the county parks, what the staff had reported. In twenty-five years there she had seen nothing herself. Soon after the house reopened, a maintenance man, alone in the building, said the door of Mr. Lawrence’s room slammed, and slammed again after he had wedged it open. A volunteer on the Christmas tours said she had felt someone with her in that room, and that a photograph had come off a ledge in the linen room. The slammed door and the photograph are what the staff described to the paper.
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