The Emlen Physick Estate is a Victorian house museum in Cape May

Cape May

Cape May is a peninsula and island ; the southern tip of the island is the southernmost point of the state of New Jersey, United States. It runs southwards from the New Jersey mainland, separating Delaware Bay from the Atlantic Ocean...

, New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

, located at 1048 Washington Street. The 18-room mansion, attributed to acclaimed American architect Frank Furness

Frank Furness

Frank Heyling Furness was an acclaimed American architect of the Victorian era. He designed more than 600 buildings, most in the Philadelphia area, and is remembered for his eclectic, muscular, often idiosyncratically scaled buildings, and for his influence on the Chicago architect Louis Sullivan...

, was built in 1879 for Dr. Emlen Physick Jr. (1855-1916), descendant of a well-known Philadelphia family, his widowed mother, Mrs. Ralston, and maiden Aunt Emilie. The mansion is closely related to Furness's Knowlton Mansion

Knowlton Mansion

Knowlton Mansion, also known as the Rhawn Residence, is a historic mansion in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States....

 (1880-81) in Northeast Philadelphia.

The Physick Mansion is one of the finest examples of “Stick Style

Stick-Eastlake

The Stick style was a late-19th-century American architectural style. According to McAlester, it served as the transition between the Carpenter Gothic style of the mid-19th century, and the Queen Anne style that it evolved into and superseded it by the 1890s....

” architecture in America. Its exterior is distinguished by Furness’s trademark oversized features, including gigantic upside-down corbelled

Corbel

In architecture a corbel is a piece of stone jutting out of a wall to carry any superincumbent weight. A piece of timber projecting in the same way was called a "tassel" or a "bragger". The technique of corbelling, where rows of corbels deeply keyed inside a wall support a projecting wall or...

 chimneys, hooded “jerkin-head” dormers, and the huge stick-like brackets on the porch. Many original furnishings are on display throughout the house.

The Mid-Atlantic Center for the Arts (MAC) was formed in 1970 to save the Physick Estate from the wrecking ball. The Center operates the estate as a Victorian historic house museum.

Sources

• Emlen Physick Estate official site
• Photographs and drawings at the Historic American Buildings Survey
  Historic American Buildings Survey
  The Historic American Buildings Survey , Historic American Engineering Record , and Historic American Landscapes Survey are programs of the National Park Service established for the purpose of documenting historic places. Records consists of measured drawings, archival photographs, and written...