Roland Curtin, born in Ireland in 1764, came to America in 1795 after briefly studying for the priesthood in Paris and settled first in Philadelphia, then in central Pennsylvania's Bald Eagle Valley, where he managed and later owned a store in Milesburg before marrying Margery Gregg in 1799. After Centre County was established and Bellefonte became the county seat, Roland and Margery moved there, where he operated a general store; they had six sons before Margery and a newborn daughter died in 1813. Roland had already entered ironmaking with Moses Boggs by establishing Eagle Forge in 1810, and after marrying his second wife, Jane Curtin, in 1814, their son Andrew Gregg Curtin was born in 1815. In the 1820s Roland built Eagle Furnace and moved his growing family nearby, and in 1830-31 he oversaw construction of the three-story ironmaster's residence later known as Curtin Mansion, a Federal-style limestone house with fifteen sixteen-foot-square rooms arranged five to a floor around a wide central hallway, two-feet-thick exterior walls, central fireplaces in the lower-floor rooms, and openings spaced to control airflow. The family moved into the house in 1831, and Roland retired in 1844. By 1848 the house was occupied by Roland's son John Curtin, his wife Julia Ann Barnhart, and their children; more children were born there in 1850 and 1852, and despite the death of Francis P. Curtin in 1854, the family remained until 1877. John and Julia Ann then retired to Bellefonte, leaving the house to their son Henry Roland "Harry" Curtin, a third-generation ironmaster, and his wife Lydia, whose children John, Hugh Laird, and Katharine were born there between 1879 and 1888. During the 1890s, while Eagle Iron Works lay dormant, Harry turned to sawmilling, land and timber sales, service in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and work gathering industry data for the Eleventh U.S. Census. After Harry's death in 1909, his son Hugh Laird Curtin Sr. became the fourth and final ironmaster, and from 1913 he and his wife Thomazine Potter raised seven children in the house. In 1951 Thomazine Potter Curtin left for Bellefonte, ending 120 years of occupation by five generations of Curtins. Between 1966 and 1974 the property passed from Curtin heirs to the Roland Curtin Foundation and then to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, was restored to mid-nineteenth-century conditions under the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and opened for public tours in 1974.