Ohio House

The Victorian Gothic Ohio House, designed by Heard and Sons of Cleveland and built by Aaron Doan and Company for the state of Ohio at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park in 1876, is one of only two surviving buildings from that event. It served as a clubhouse and exhibition hall and was constructed of heavy stone masonry that showcased Ohio quarries and masons through intricately carved detailing on the façade. Set within Hermann Schwartzmann’s park-like exhibition grounds and its network of axes linking buildings sponsored by state, federal, and local institutions, it was considered by many during the Centennial to be the most elegant and substantial of all the state edifices. As most Centennial buildings were later removed and the row of state-sponsored buildings along States Avenue disappeared, the Ohio House lost much of its original context, but its sturdy masonry allowed it to survive into the twenty-first century. It was individually listed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places in 1963 and later included as a contributing resource in the Fairmount Park National Register Historic District in 1972, and it has been reused over the years as a residence, offices, and the Fairmount Park Information Center for the Bicentennial. Its most striking feature is its extensive display of nineteenth-century Ohio stone, including sandstone and limestone from twenty historic quarries, with carvings that often identify quarry names, locations, trade names, distributors, or masons as advertisements for the stone companies, while the rusticated and variously tooled stonework on its façades demonstrates a wide range of finishing techniques.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania · United States