Updated update: The link in the comment by “Zak” no longer works, but you can see a fine hand-colored version of this image here.
This is the same photograph, but note how the debris at the bottom has been edited out. Yes, people could do that before Photoshop. There is also a photograph from the side.
From the vanished page to which Zak referred we learned that this house burned in 1913; it would have been on the Pittsburgh side of the river opposite where the Waterfront is now. The contractors who moved the house, John Eichelay Jr. Co., specialized in moving buildings, though even they considered this one a remarkable feat. The same company, in 1945, got the contract for moving the first atom bomb.
For historical reasons, we keep the original version of the article below.
From the Booklovers Magazine in 1904. Can anyone identify this house or its exact location? The text below is all Father Pitt has to go on, which tells us that it is somewhere in the Mon Valley near Pittsburgh, but not exactly where. We do not know, for example, whether “about ten miles from Pittsburgh” means ten miles along the river or ten miles as the crow flies. Ten miles along the river would put the house in Homestead or thereabouts.
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