Lukens Historic District

Four buildings on one block of South First Avenue in Coatesville make up this district, centered on the Lukens family and the Brandywine mill. Brandywine, the house Rebecca Lukens lived in from 1816 until her death in 1854, has 18th-century stone and stucco sections and sits beside the rolling mill she managed. Terracina, a Gothic Revival house around 1850, was given by Lukens to her daughter Isabella on her marriage to Dr. Charles Huston. Graystone, commissioned in 1889 by grandson Abram Francis Huston, was designed by Cope and Stewardson, as was the 1902 main office building. The district is significant for Rebecca Lukens's management of the iron works after her husband's death in 1825, at a time when few women headed heavy industry. Her firm supplied boiler plate to markets across the United States and to England, and the houses show the growing prosperity of the company and family over the following decades.