Alvan Markle and his wife, Mary D. Markle, bought their Conyngham Pass Property from the Lehigh Coal and Land Company in 1915 and commissioned John Russell Pope to design their thirty-two room home, built in 1924 with thick fieldstone walls and poured-in-place concrete to guard against forest fires; they named the estate Highacres, and the home is now Penn State Hazleton's Administration Building. Alvan Markle was instrumental in installing the nation's sixth electric power plant in Hazleton in 1883, became president of the Markle Banking and Trust Company in 1886 and for forty-three years funded many local enterprises, linked more than seventeen isolated colliery villages to Hazleton by electric trolley in 1892, created Hazle Park as a forty-acre public recreational area, devised the protected-third-rail power supply system, built the Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton Railroad in 1903, commissioned the Markle Banking and Trust Company building in 1910, organized telephone service for Hazleton in 1913 as president of the Lehigh Telephone Company, held leadership roles in coal and manufacturing companies, and served in public roles during World War I, including chairman of the Luzerne County Public Safety Committee, director of the Pennsylvania Council on National Defense, leader of Liberty Loan drives, tax collector for Hazleton without compensation, chairman of the Joint United Mine Workers and Anthracite Operators Committee from 1909 to 1924, director of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania State Chambers of Commerce in 1916, and Special Assistant to the Postmaster General under President Harding. His family later helped expand Penn State Hazleton: in 1948 Alvan Markle Jr. encouraged Eckley B. C. Markle to give sixty acres to the Hazleton Educational Council for the campus and sell six more acres with the buildings and gardens on generous terms; in 1969 Donald Markle gave his adjoining thirty-one acre estate, Norwinds, to Penn State University for one dollar plus related expenses; in 1998 Hazel R. Markle gave seven acres near Council Crest for one dollar, their four children established the Alvan Markle Jr. and Gladys Jones Markle Scholarship, and the heirs of Steven D. Engle donated an additional twenty-seven acres to Penn State.