John Roebling House

Address 215 South Rebecca Street, Saxonburg

This is the modest two-storey clapboard house where John A. Roebling lived from the early 1830s while he developed his wire rope manufacturing in Saxonburg. It is privately owned and closed to the public, but worth a brief stop to read the historical marker and appreciate the unlikely origin of one of the great American engineering dynasties.

The Saxonburg Memorial Presbyterian Church next door, founded by the same German settlers, is the other significant landmark. The Roebling Park at the southern edge of town has interpretive panels that fill in more of the story.

things to do sight historic house
A story
John A. Roebling came to Saxonburg in 1831 as a 25-year-old German engineer hoping to start a farming colony, but he soon turned to engineering and invented the wire rope that would carry the world's great suspension bridges. He spun his first cables on his Saxonburg ropewalk. By the time his son was running the Roebling firm, the company had built the Brooklyn Bridge, John's masterpiece, completed in 1883, fourteen years after his accidental death from a tetanus infection.