Schwixon: the Schwab-Dixon Mansion

08/13/2026

Not much going on that's very photogenic. You really don't want to see brick pointing, and the chimney has only progressed one more tier (five courses) of bricks since that last shot, but there is this.

This is a Monarch, newly-emerged from its chrysalis on a milkweed stalk in a vase of water in the Butler's Pantry and taken out to one of the advanced backcross American Chestnuts out back, about to take flight. It's a male, too, by the dark spots in the middle of a vein in each lower wing.

Occurs to me that this may be the first thing of any merit to be born inside Schwixon since at least 1951. Pets would count, but I don't know of any that lived here after the last Edgar Thomson Superintendent vacated that year, and I don't know of any pets that any of them had before that, either, for that matter. Dixon had no dogs or cats, and I don't either.

This is my first attempt at this, but there are currently three more in the pipeline. (But that's nothing - a friend has raised 11 this year, with 25 more in various stages of development!)

07/30/2026

Putting this here to catch a wider local audience. Until shown otherwise, this is North Braddock's first motorized fire truck. A clipping (see below) from 1911 establishes the Packard as 1911. I thought it was likely earlier because of the headlamps and because from the back of the card it appeared that the NBFD had it for sale by 1911. But with the clipping that describes it as new, it appears that the card is trying to interest other buyers in ordering one.

The firehouse was just up Jones, at the corner with Spring (now vacant with remnants of the foundations), seen in the last postcard pic. The fire truck in that pic appears to be the same one as in the first.

High above Spring is Locust, where my father was born 1/6/1910, @ 901 Locust (corner with Miller).

And if anyone is interested in colorizing the card, the color is a sort of blue-purple. This seems to have been the color of NB fire vehicles for a long time, as indicated by the color of it in the last card, descriptions of a 1933 (IIRC) Marmon in purple, and the color of the 1956 Ford squad car that the NBFD sold not that many yrs ago.

07/21/2026

Another granite belt joins the potting shed chimney.

07/09/2026

Recall that Charlie's second private rail car, the Loretto II (~1916) most recently wound up at the Colebrookdale Railroad in Boyertown, eastern PA. When I looked at the time I couldn't find any pix and hadn't gone looking again until now. Still no pix that I could find about the restoration (there was a fire in 1983), but after a bit of digging on their site I did find this page with a photomontage of maybe 20 shots of the interior.

Meanwhile, you can see the Loretto I in nice unrestored condition at the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer. If you contact them in advance with a convincing excuse, they may let you inside. I posted pix of it here ca. 2019.

Learn more and book online with live availability

05/15/2026

Meanwhile, along with pointing of the SW facade, Lady Schwixon is in the midst of getting her frame painted.

05/15/2026

I just received this link to the electronic version Geo Lamb's 1917 The Unwritten History of Braddock's Field. Charley Schwab is mentioned frequently. His successors at the ET, and subsequent occupants of Schwixon, Tom Morrison and Charles E Dinkey are also included.

03/17/2026

View from the front porch last night. Orange is the flame from another batch of steel at the Edgar Thomson Works. Charlie would’ve been able to see and take satisfaction from the same thing, especially from the upstairs tower window in the billiards room, on the SW (downhill) side.

03/08/2026

Recall that Charlie was largely responsible for the briefly flourishing Rhyolite NV (not all that far from Las Vegas). Goldfield NV is not all that far from Rhyolite (by the standards of distance that exist out there), and it's not as complete a ghost town as Rhyolite. They even have their own radio station that operates out of the empty hotel there, Radio Goldfield. (One of my friends in the Chestnut Fdn was out there hiking and tipped me to it.) If you have an Alexa or like device you can listen by just saying "Alexa, play Radio Goldfield". I'm listening to it now.

One of the little features on the station is reading news from Goldfield from the early 1900s. So in that connection, here's a bit of news from Braddock about Schwixon from 1894. The power outage that we recently had here is nothing new. That's why light fixtures back then were combo gas/electric.

01/05/2026

This is pretty cool. There probably aren't too many mansions that have themselves facilitated events of historical significance. But one of those is in Tuxedo Park NY, owned by Alfred Loomis at the time of the event, which was development of radar just on the cusp of WWII. There's a good book about it, too: “Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II” (Conant, 2003). Cheap copies abound on Alibris. Here's a short summary:

[Legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the twentieth century -- Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, and others -- at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York, in the late 1930s. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of James Bryant Conant, one of the leading scientific advisers of World War II, enjoyed unprecedented access to Loomis' papers, as well as to people intimately involved in his life and work. She pierces through Loomis' obsessive secrecy and illuminates his role in assuring the Allied victory.]

I read the book not all that long after it came out, and about 8yrs ago PBS did a special on Loomis and his secret lab, that people like Einstein Niels Bohr, Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, and Werner Heiusenberg had visited.

But what did/does it look like inside? Now it's for sale, and if you can mentally subtract some of the modern furnishings you can get a sense of the interior here. (I'm not a great fan of Tudor, bit the rustic stonework is great, as is the rustic setting):

On top of a scenic mountain with nearby lakes and within beautiful gate-guarded Tuxedo Park, the Loomis Lab is a three-storey stone and timbered mansion built in 1901 for Spencer Trask, philanthropist and founder of art colony Yaddo.

01/01/2026

Euclid Ave in Cleveland was Millionaire's Row. They're almost all long-gone, and until now I had never seen a collection of pix of Cleveland mansions, so this is just for reference. They're all larger than Schwixon, which is not a good formula for survival.

Discussing Millionaires' Row in Cleveland, OhioMusic: Decoherence (Scott Buckley)