By the 1890s, Ridgway's tanning industry had reached its peak, and Calvin McCauley purchased both the OB Grant Tannery and the Eagle Valley Tannery to form the Elk Tanning Company before selling it to the United States Leather Company, at its height the world's largest producer of sole leather with 153 tanneries. A prominent lawyer and chief solicitor for the U. S. Leather Company, McCauley made his fortune and in 1891 began building one of Ridgway's most elegant homes, a twenty-room brownstone mansion built with stone shipped from Buffalo, New York, completed after two years, and finished with detailed interior woodwork by the Hyde-Murphy Company, inlaid floors of White Mahogany, African Mahogany, and native oak, a billiard room, double drawing rooms, a Turkish room, and an Italian sitting garden behind the house. McCauley spent $70,000 to build it. In 1923 he sold the mansion to Samuel Murphy, son of Hyde-Murphy Company co-founder Walter P. Murphy, and Murphy and his family lived there for the next 33 years. On December 15, 1956, a truck lost its brakes on Bootjack Hill, careened onto Main Street, and crashed into the side of the mansion, setting it ablaze and destroying the interior, though firefighters carried Samuel Murphy and his family to safety. In the early 1900s, Ridgway's lumbering wealth gave it one of the highest numbers of millionaires per capita in the United States, and the McCauley home stood among several notable mansions and many other historic residences, businesses, and public buildings in the town.