OP-ED: Attending to Linden Hall
When tourists visit the estate known as Linden Hall at St. James Park, they typically focus on the visible things like its amazing stonework and Tudor-style architecture. They see the sense of permanence rising from the hills a few miles from Dawson. What often is left unobserved is how that permanence happened, and how it was maintained long after the last stone was placed and the last important guest had departed. Linden Hall stands today because it was held together by both power and devotion.
That power belonged to Sarah Boyd Moore Cochran, who was born in 1857 on a poor farm in Fayette County. She was first a housekeeper in the home of James Cochran, a Connellsville coke trade pioneer. That was where she met and married James’ son Philip.
Coal and coke from the Fayette County region fueled the steel mills of Pittsburgh and beyond. It connected small river towns to international markets. When Philip Cochran suddenly died in 1899, Sarah took charge of the family’s enterprises. Their only son, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, died of pneumonia only two years later. That was when she did something few women of her era were even permitted to consider: she chose to lead.
At a time when women were customarily excluded from mine management and even considered bad luck underground, Sarah took over full control of the businesses. She became president of numerous coal, coke, and banking enterprises that operated across Pennsylvania and neighboring states. Even though her competition included men like Henry Clay Frick, she quickly expanded sales to Europe and Mexico. By the early 20th century, she was sometimes called “America’s Coal Queen.”
After the death of her family, Linden Hall became her personal refuge and a significant public statement. It was a symbol of what she had built and how she had survived. She hosted bishops, college presidents, suffrage leaders, and industrialists there. But while Sarah herself was the center of that world, the daily work of keeping it functional and dignified was on others. It fell to men and women whose names do not appear in history books.
Among them was my great uncle, Marco Tata, who family accounts recall was Sarah Cochran’s lead servant. In a household controlled by a powerful widow, Marco held a position of unusual trust for an immigrant from Alvito, Italy. Marco managed the daily life inside Linden Hall. He attended to Sarah herself, oversaw household order, and ensured the discretion required of a home where her private grief and public responsibility were synonymous with her history. Marco was a steady presence behind the public legend.
Outside, was Pasquale Iacoboni, my grandfather. Patsy, who worked at Linden Hall for 50 years, was another Italian immigrant who served as her head gardener. He was responsible for the formal gardens, the greenhouses, and, in the colder months, the heating systems. These were the systems that sustained both the estate’s beauty and its survival. His gardens required difficult work and complete discipline. The greenhouses required constant vigilance through Pennsylvania winters, and the furnace was the estate’s beating heart, 24/7. To be responsible for it was to be entrusted with everything.
Patsy remained through Sarah Cochran’s death in 1936 and into the estate’s next chapters. When he died in 1963, a half-century of the knowledge of every pipe, pathway, garden, and planting went with him.
Together, Sarah B. Cochran, Marco Tata, and Pasquale Iacoboni tell a fuller story of Linden Hall. Vision, grit, and wealth built it. Immigrant skill, loyalty, and pride in work sustained it. Dozens of Italian craftsmen helped raise its walls, and Italian immigrants kept it alive.
History lives not only in boardrooms. It lives in furnaces fired over freezing winter nights, in greenhouses warmed before dawn year after year to produce beautiful formal gardens. Linden Hall stood because power, labor, devotion, and love held it together.
Nick Jacobs is a resident of Windber.