Crawford County Estates in the Downton Abbey Era

Baldwin Reynolds Home & Estate

The “Downton” Era (1910s and 1920s) was a time or expansion of ideas, but for a tightening of funds in large manors, or, in the case in America, smaller landed estates. “The Terrace,” as it was called in Meadville, was the undisputed millionaire’s row of the city which, along with upper Chestnut Street and a few smaller neighborhoods interspersed throughout town, boasted the Huidekoper, Reynolds, Magaw, Boileau, and Shryock families.

Terrace Street, 1935

This aerial photo from 1935 shows “the Terrace,” complete with gardens around the houses (one even has a formal English garden), a tennis court, and a wave of new housing directly behind all of these properties. A few decades earlier, with the exception of outbuildings and a few dwellings for farm hands or tenants, this map would have shown five or six mansions, and little else. The era of estate living was quickly becoming a thing of the past, both here and across the pond.