Want a free historic mansion? Here’s the ridiculous catch
How’s this for a home deal: a free mansion!
Sounds great, but for the next owner of the Hood Mansion, there’s a catch—and it’s a pricey one: It has to be moved from its current location in Limerick, PA.
And moving mansions doesn’t come cheap.
“The ideal candidate would have large, deep pockets and have an appreciation for preservation,” explains Tyler Schumacher, president and founder of the Eastern Pennsylvania Preservation Society, which is trying to save the historic Hood Mansion. “We’re looking at probably around $700,000 to a million [dollars] to move the home, depending on the distance traveled.”
And, of course, saving the house will require its new owner to secure a new location for the dwelling.
“It’s a lot, but you’re getting a lot of house,” Schumacher points out. “And you’re not going to find a house better constructed than this one, and you’re not going to find another house that has as much rich history as this home does.”
The current owner wants to build a warehouse complex on the 113-acre site, so the house has to go. After some negotiations, the owner agreed to allow someone to take the building for free as long as it is moved off of the land.
“We sprang into action to try to save the home,” Schumacher says, adding that he created the preservation society a few years earlier to try to save the home when someone else owned it. The timing became a bit more urgent, though, when the current owner bought the property in 2021.
Historic home
“I remember when I first saw it,” Schumacher recalls. “The home is just so stately, sitting on top of the hill, overlooking the fields and the creek and the little valley that’s in front of it. It just really spoke to me.”
He admits the place “needs some help” but notes that it’s in “amazing condition,” structurally.
“You’ll walk through, and you’ll notice that there are hardly any cracks in the plaster,” he says. “The walls are smooth. It’s like it was just built yesterday.”
Cosmetically, well, that’s another story.
“All the trim and stuff like that is intact, but some of the decorative elements were vandalized and stolen,” Schumacher reports. “Pretty much every window in the house is broken. Some doors are missing. The banister is missing.”
The 17-room mansion dates back to 1834, when John McClellan Hood built the home as a summer getaway for his family, who lived in Philadelphia.
“It’s really well constructed and really quite a structure for 1834,” Schumacher notes. “When it was first constructed, there was nothing around. Its location, and method of construction, and how it was designed is just so rare for that area and for that time period.”
One of Hood’s sons was Washington Hood, the 500th graduate of the Army’s West Point Academy in 1827. He went on to map a large portion of the Oregon Territory, and there is a monument to him in the home’s backyard.
The mansion is also said to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Descendants of the Hood family owned the stately mansion until the late 1980s, when they auctioned it off. That’s when someone bought it, intending to build a country club on the property and use the home as a clubhouse.
But those plans never materialized, and the owner rented out the place to a series of caretakers until 2008.
“That real estate developer sold it to another company that was going to tear the house down and put a casino on the property,” Schumacher says. “They kind of sat on the land and didn’t do anything.”
The home has been abandoned since.
Sometime in 2015 or 2016, vandals broke in.
“They had a big party in there, and a lot of things got smashed and stolen and broken,” Schumacher says. “That’s why it’s in the condition it’s in today.”
Costs will add up
Schumacher estimates it will probably cost around $500,000 to renovate and rebuild the home after it is moved. Despite the challenges and potential costs, several people have shown an interest.
“We don’t have a specific timeframe, but the developer asked us to try to get this done as soon as possible,” he says. “For somebody that’s interested, they can contact us and we can arrange a phone call and discuss further; and then we can kind of go from there on next steps.”
While Schumacher is realistic about the challenges around moving and rehabilitating the Hood Mansion, he’s also hopeful.
“I felt as though somebody needs to tell the story of the Hood family and tell the story about this house and why it was constructed,” he says. “Somebody needed to bring attention to this home.”
