Holly Mauser never saw the house during her childhood when her family came to Coudersport to buy groceries for their cabin in Potter County. She did notice other homes in Coudersport, which, unlike the suburbs where she lived, offered life-sized dollhouses that she liked to imagine as hers.

Years later, Holly, a dentist living and working in the Lehigh Valley where she grew up, followed the Coudersport real estate listings hoping to realize her childhood dream. One late July afternoon on a stroll downtown, she had a vision that “dropped down” before her eyes: A derelict mansion “bathed in a beautiful light,” its narrow front withdrawn from the sidewalk and the broader side facing the Allegheny River obscured by shrubbery. On that “picture perfect” evening, she was sold.

Was it the luminous dusk that made her pop on the house? Perhaps it was the graceful lines of the Italianate structure with its slim windows—built not in brick like the overblown villas in Pittsburgh, but elegantly crafted from the area’s native woods. Or maybe it was its pitiful condition, unloved for three decades. “There was something about the house,” Holly recalls, “something important that deserved keeping.”

Holly was not the first in that spot to be struck by a vision. Almost 140 years earlier, F.W. Knox, Potter County lawyer, publisher, and railroad man, wanted to build a new home in Coudersport convenient to his law offices and topped with a tower to oversee the trains that would soon enter the town on the town on the Coudersport and Port Allegany Railroad, known as the C&PA, the line he had championed and that would connect Coudersport to the northeastern rail grid. He would find his dream home pictured in the 1878 Palliser’s American Cottage Homes: “A comfortable, convenient cottage home of six rooms, with tower which is designed to command a view of the surrounding country….”

Knox moved into the house in 1880 with his wife and two-year-old daughter. There he saw the first years of the C&PA, the birth of a son, and the death of his wife. After Knox died in 1891, the home was sold to Thomas J. Lawler, superintendent of the Coudersport Leather Company, which was, by most accounts, the country’s biggest producer of shoe soles. Lawler lived in the home with his wife and nine children until relocating to Buffalo in 1928.

When the Lawlers departed, the home sold to Howard and Willard Schutt and Hollingsworth Pett. Renaming it for a historic Coudersport hostelry, they opened Old Hickory Tavern, with three dining rooms downstairs, a basement lounge (Old Hickory Taproom following Prohibition), and ten guest rooms. Promoted as the “gateway to the Black Forest” and a convenient stopover on the Roosevelt Highway—“the shortest all-improved throughfare between New York and Chicago”—the inn attracted travelers motoring between the Northeast and the Midwest, lodgers with business in Coudersport, and locals attending club meetings, banquets, and dinner dances.

Beginning in 1940, Old Hickory Tavern and Taproom saw a succession of owners over the next forty-five years. It survived several fires, one flood, and a shooting death in the basement lounge. The business hung on until October 1986, when the property and contents (including a pump organ and railroad clock) went up for auction. The Rigas family, of Adelphia Communications fame, bought the house and gutted it, envisioning it as corporate guest quarters. Following the company’s bankruptcy and another abortive attempt at restoration by a subsequent owner, the property languished until August 2016, when Holly had her vision.

There was much to admire and evaluate when Holly took possession, including two lovely staircases (one of which was half gone), the basement taproom with its fading wall advertisement, and the tower. Carefully climbing the tower staircase, spreading clouds of dust and scaring the resident pigeons, she looked through a broken window and saw another beautiful vision—the town. It was Knox’s gift to her.

One month after closing, Holly, joined by family and friends, set about restoring the dream house and its windows. There are more than seventy, including the narrow round-topped casements, the two-story bay windows, and the tower’s “angel wing” variety. They installed the first “angel wing” in October 2016 and the last in May 2018. The following June, they finished rehabilitating the bay windows and painting the tower’s exterior, capping an eighteen-month segment of their epic restoration project.

Over the next few years, Holly and the team focused on stabilizing the front porch, replacing windows as they arrived from the factory, refurbishing the staircases, installing new siding, restoring the rear porch and back walls, detailing the front and back porches, reinforcing basement beams, and laying out interior walls to form the open-concept kitchen-dining room along with eleven bedrooms—nine with ensuite bathrooms, one suite with shared bath, and one accessible room. What next? Replacing the aging wood shingles with a slate roof.

Holly readily shares what she has learned from her eight-year experience: “When you befriend a house, you do the same to a community.” She notes that neighbors across Coudersport have taken a protective interest in the house, looking after it in her absence. The experience yielded new friendships and inspired her to advocate for other overlooked homes in need of rescue. “We need to care about the history of our towns,” she adds. “We can keep things!”

And the future of Holly’s vision? Old Hickory-Knox Mansion will become a venue for weddings, “girls’ weekends,” murder mystery sleepovers, and visitors’ holidays—particularly those visitors from around the world who follow the restoration of the once-overlooked mansion on social media, even receiving tattoos of its towered elegance.

And Holly? She’ll stand in the tower, bask in the sunset and, like F.W. Knox, enjoy a dream come true—a vision of the town they both grew to love.