A Hong Kong dentist and a crooked bank executive are a part of the colorful history behind the Swarner House at 801 S. Hanover St. in Carlisle.
The stately Victorian style mansion is the first old building northbound travelers come across after leaving Interstate 81 at the Hanover Street exit.
In October 1989, attorney Robert Frey compiled a history of the three-story brownstone and brick house currently owned by the Carlisle Area School District. The information below is drawn from that history.
The Swarner House sits on land that was originally part of the Noble farm, which took up a swath of land bounded on the north by Willow Street, the east by Letort Spring and the south by I-81.
Dr. Joseph Noble was a dentist who married late and spent most of his career in the British colony of Hong Kong, where he amassed a considerable fortune. On January 1906, Noble executed a deed in the colonial city of Victoria that was executed before the U.S. Consul General to China.
Recorded in Cumberland County in September 1906, the deed transferred ownership of part of the farm to a John V. Harris whose family built the mansion in 1907. The first floor at that time consisted of a large entrance hall and dining room with a kitchen on the north side and a parlor on the south side.
The second floor had four bedrooms, a sewing room, balcony, bathroom and a rear stairway. The third floor sported what was said to be the largest private ballroom in Carlisle at the time accessible by a stairway from the foyer. “It was also probably the first house in Carlisle in which an electrical security system was installed,” Frey wrote.
There once was a wrought iron picket fence in front of the house along a right-of-way belonging to the company that operated a trolley line until 1930. The fence was removed when South Hanover Street was widened in connection with the construction of the highway interchange.
Through a separate deed in early August 1907, John V. Harris conveyed the land to O.T. Harris, either his father or brother. The property was then acquired by the Merchants National Bank, which ceased to function after John Harris was caught embezzling money as the cashier or head of the bank. No dollar amount was mentioned in the history.
John’s wife, Florence, became the scapegoat of his troubles in the eyes of local residents, according to Frey. While John was well-liked and highly regarded in the Carlisle community, Florence was thought by some as overly socially ambitious with an attitude of superiority.
When word surfaced that John had misappropriated bank funds, the public presumed that Florence had goaded him into building a more expensive home than he could afford thus leading to her husband’s downfall.
Ownership of the property then passed to Willoughby Albright, who in turn willed the estate to Fannie Albright, his widow, and to their only child, Effie Albright Swarner. At Fannie’s death in 1941, Effie became the sole owner. Prior to that, the Swarner family rented the house out to others during most of the period leading up to the 1930s.
For years the Swarner family alternated their place of residence between this house on South Hanover Street and a stone farmhouse on Rockledge Drive in neighboring South Middleton Township. Meanwhile Joseph Noble, the original owner of the property, died on July 2, 1949, and left the bulk of his fortune to Carlisle Hospital. In 1950, Effie Swarner conveyed the property to her son F. Albright Swarner who in 1984 conveyed it to Russel C. Lash.
The front yard of the Swarner House was lost to make way for the Hanover Street exit ramp of the I-81 interchange. In the early 1980s, the land was rezoned from residential to commercial, and Lash was successful in negotiating access to the property from the neighboring Carlisle Area School District. The Swarner House sits adjacent to Lamberton Middle School.
In May 1987, Lash conveyed the property to Ben and Michelle Breneman, who used the house for their Century 21 real estate business. The Brenemans were the owners of the Swarner Mansion when Frey wrote his history of the building in 1989.
Eventually the school district purchased the Swarner Mansion as a way to control traffic onto South Hanover Street and to prevent redevelopment of the mansion site into commercial activity, Director of Finance Shawn Farr said in a September 2013 story published by The Sentinel.
The district renovated and repaired the mansion to house offices that oversee the registration of students, special education, transportation and safety/security. The building was not designed to handle the weight load of staff and office equipment put on it by the district.
The 2013 story detailed a proposal by the district to purchase the former Pennsylvania Department of Transportation maintenance building at 540 W. North St. The district eventually purchased that building.
One goal of the purchase was to move the maintenance department from the Swartz building of Carlisle High School to the former PennDOT building. This would clear out space in the Swartz building to move over the office functions of the Swarner building.