The many lives of a mansion

By SUE MORRIS
For the MVI

A graceful brick wall lining Pittsburgh– McKeesport Boulevard in West Mifflin, between the Bettis nuclear plant and Harbison Walker International, leads the eye to an elegant stone home. Repurposed many times, the building has been an eyewitness to a century of marvels, from biplanes to disco.

A gracious home

Who would build such a fancy home between Kennywood and the Allegheny County Airport? The house owes its existence to Frank Thoburn and Emma Nason, notable but now-forgotten residents of McKeesport a century ago. The home they built in Mifflin Township, some 10 miles from downtown Pittsburgh, culminated a two decade climb up Dravosburg Hill to the apogee of local social prominence.

The Nason estate is shown on the far right in this archived photo. Courtesy of Cynthia Campbell

The home is shown last winter.

F.T. Nason, born in 1868 in Townville, Crawford County, was the seventh of eight children of Dr. William Nason and Catharine Breed. Three of the five Nason boys became physicians like their father. In 1889, Nason graduated from the recently formed Western Pennsylvania Medical College (which was eventually integrated into today’s University of Pittsburgh).

A view of the sunken garden is shown. Courtesy of Jeff and Carol Bires

A year later, Nason married Emma Lou Sloan of Venango County, whose family had been living in the 1880s with an uncle in Allegheny City. Nason settled into practice in McKeesport and the couple maintained a home there on Walnut Street for over 15 years, which they occasionally shared with members of Emma’s family. Sons born in 1898 and 1899 died in infancy.

Frank Thoburn Nason may have informally adopted the first name of Thomas; at the very least he embraced ambiguity when his name appeared as F. Tho. Nason. Under one name or another Nason was frequently in the news professionally – and for shenanigans like a $3 speeding ticket in 1907 for proving how fast his Oldsmobile touring car could climb a hill (he declared the ticket had been “worth it”).

Speed racing aside, Nason kept busy as a physician in McKeesport, which from 1890 to 1910 expanded in population from 21,000 to 42,694 people. The booming steel industry drove massive population growth as thousands of immigrants sought jobs after National Tube Company’s 1901 merger with U.S. Steel. But in 1916, the busy physician was also embroiled in a controversy at Presbyterian Hospital (then on Pittsburgh’s North Side) when he, two other doctors, and the female superintendent resigned in protest over management prioritizing profits over patient care. Taking a controversial stance was bold, but Nason was later reinstated to surgical staff.

Although he would have enjoyed a comfortable living as a physician, Nason harbored grander aspirations and diversified his investments after World War I. His association with the Snake Hollow Oil and Gas Company to capitalize on a shortlived “oil craze” in McKeesport did little to advance his fortunes. But he found success as a banker, first with McKeesport City Bank and then as President of People City Bank of McKeesport after a 1925 consolidation. That same year he founded McKeesport Journal, a short-lived afternoon newspaper which merged with McKeesport Daily News two years later. Nason also headed the boards of numerous local concerns, including McKeesport Tin Plate Company and McKeesport Hospital.

A 1925 opinion piece reprinted in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette lauded Nason’s business successes as exemplifying a worthy spirit of civic responsibility: “for many years he was an eminent surgeon, and his fame went out far beyond the boundary lines of Allegheny county. Leaving his profession, Dr. Nason went into business as an entirely new career, with interests including many of the worthwhile concerns in McKeesport.”

While such “worthwhile concerns” were praiseworthy, they also allowed the Nasons to live large and travel regularly. From 1914 to 1917 they owned a stately 13-room brick home on Darlington Road in Squirrel Hill. After selling, they rented an equally respectable 11-room home on Shady Avenue for several years.

But their hearts remained across the river, and in 1920 they acquired more than a thousand acres along Pittsburgh-McKeesport Road. This spot, just a mile above the Monongahela River where a rickety bridge crossed from Dravosburg into McKeesport, was coveted high ground above the region’s industrial spine. Over the next year, they constructed a 4,700 square foot home complete with carriage house/garage and landscaped gardens. Their new estate was a showpiece surrounded by mostly undeveloped farmland.

Witness to the golden age of aviation

It would not stay undeveloped for long. The cleared hilltop above the house had attracted early pilots, daredevils who barnstormed across the country in canvas and wooden biplanes and who needed a level place to land. During the summer of 1919, aviators calling themselves the Zenith Flyers encamped there for six weeks, performing stunts and selling rides in their WWI surplus Curtiss Jenny biplanes.

A neighbor, 22-year-old survey engineer David Barr Peat, offered his mechanical skills to the Flyers. Given the population boom in the area, Peat dreamed of buying the rolling tracts of farmland across from the Nasons on Pittsburgh-McKeesport Boulevard to develop into home lots to transform this corner of Mifflin Township into a suburban extension of McKeesport. But he took inspiration from the barnstormers to develop a permanent airfield instead. Peat approached Clifford Ball, a McKeesport Essex-Hudson car dealer, to finance purchasing and grading properties across from the Nason home. On June 19, 1926, Pittsburgh- McKeesport Airport was dedicated. It was renamed Bettis Field five months later, for pilot Lt. Cyrus Bettis who had recently died in an Allegheny Mountains crash.

Photos show the Nason home nestled into the background as the aviation age unfolded across the street. Mrs. Nason’s club meetings and musicales were punctuated by the smell of exhaust and interrupted by the buzz and drone of propellers and engines. The house was admired by thousands of visitors from all over Allegheny County who came to the new airport for weekly Sunday airshows, filling the airfield grounds with parked cars, picnicking on the grass, and clambering over wooden bleachers to watch the fun.

Charles Lindbergh drew tens of thousands to the field during his August 1927 tour, circling over the Nason home as he landed and took off. A year later the National Balloon Race attracted crowds who came to ogle 14 hydrogen-filled balloons and Pilgrim, the first helium Goodyear blimp. The Nasons could watch this activity from their porch or bedroom windows. They could walk to their sunken garden and gaze upwards to see stunt fliers and parachute jumpers circling overhead. They needed only to exert themselves to cross the road to buy barbeque at the ramshackle airfield snack bar.

Bettis Field’s regularly scheduled air mail and passenger routes made it the “Aerial Gateway to the West” and the birthplace of commercial aviation in Allegheny County. But danger fueled the excitement of the era, and occasionally danger struck too close to home – literally, for the Nasons. In 1928, a biplane crashed onto the estate, killing the pilot and two passengers. In May 1935, a student pilot making his first parachute jump landed in a tree on the grounds, so entangled that airport employees had to remove several branches to extricate him.

Frank Thoburn Nason missed that last bit of excitement. He passed away unexpectedly at McKeesport Hospital in April 1935 at age 68 from sudden thrombosis. His wife Emma died of cancer in 1942 at their home. Her will bequeathed most of her earthly possessions to relatives and friends and dictated that they sell the home (an additional building on the grounds was left to her chauffeur and his family).

Mixed use

In 1931 Bettis Field had been supplanted by the nearby Allegheny County Airport but continued to operate privately and was home to various flight schools, most significantly Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics (PIA, now at Allegheny County Airport). Following Mrs. Nason’s passing, her home was leased to PIA in December 1942 to be used as a dormitory for students during the school’s World War II expansion. The lease was still in effect when the home was purchased in June 1943 by Barbara Frederick Paul. She, husband Ralph, and son Shale Paul lived there for at least a decade while amassing other real estate. They created a holding company for property management named Bettis, Inc., a nod to their across-thestreet neighbors.

Other parts of the former Nason property were divided and sold for development. The hilltop where the intrepid Zenith Flyers once landed was sold in 1956 to Harbison-Walker for its new refractory research center. The house itself, sold again in the 1970s, was known locally by 1975 as The Victorian House. It functioned as a restaurant and nightclub that operated well into the mid-1980s, when it was best known as Sonny’s Mansion. Locals tell tales about late night dancing to bands and DJs and weekend volleyball games in the garden but – perhaps mercifully – few photos exist from this precell phone era.

In 1993 the home, garage, and carriage house were purchased at sheriff’s sale by Jeff and Carol Bires, former travel industry executives who committed to restoring the home to a semblance of its century-old glamour. Though they have no interior photos to guide them, the Bireses follow the bones of the old house when renovating. That isn’t always easy given how drastically it was altered during its nightclub era, which included removing the main staircase and adding a stage and partially mirrored dropped ceiling in the master bedroom. The Bireses continue room by room, lovingly sourcing period furniture, recreating and refurbishing architectural elements, and employing woodworking artisans to bring the home to life once again.

Today the century-old home overlooks not runways filled with aviation pioneers but technical pioneers who labor within the high-security Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory established in 1949. The house is ready to witness its next century’s worth of stories.

Sue Morris (historicaldilettante.com) is a regional public historian and co-author of the Heinz History Center’s Bettis: Where Pittsburgh Aviation Took Off with West Mifflin native Brian Butko.