A superb example of Pennsylvania architecture in the English style, the Wright's Ferry Mansion in Columbia, Lancaster County, has been restored and furnished as it was in 1738 when it was built for Susanna Wright, daughter of John Wright who named the county after the town where he was born in England.
Provenance
Photographs and slides donated by Discover Lancaster/Pennsylvania Dutch Country Visitors Bureau, June 2016.
In: The Old Lancaster Antiques Show, (November 17-20, 1983)
Summary
"On the eastern bank of the Susquehanna River in southeastern Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Lancaster, Wright’s Ferry Mansion was built in 1738 for a remarkable English Quaker, Susanna Wright. In 1726, when Susanna was twenty-nine, she purchased one hundred acres in this region on the fringes of Pennsylvania wilderness, then inhabited by a small tribe of Indians and known as Shawanahtown-on-Susquehanna.Bright, unmarried, possibly using money from her dowry for the purchase of the land, this dynamic eighteenth-century lady was aware of the needs and potentials – not only political, agricultural and commercial, but also spiritual and intellectual – for the development of this area."
