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Great hall and an extensive greenhouse complex. In addition to its own water supply, Penshurst maintained an electrical plant, chapel, stables, and a large dairy complex housing Roberts’ imported herd of prize Ayrshire cattle. As president of U.S. Steel’s Ambridge Division, Percival Roberts was not only Lower Merion Township’s largest single landowner but its largest private employer as well. Relations between the Township and its leading taxpayer were often less than cordial. The milk produced by the Penshurst Ayrshires, though produced under strict sanitary conditions, was not pasteurized. Lower Merion health officials visited Penshurst’s lord and master with a series of spot inspections and fined him for sanitary violations during the 1920s. In 1939 Lower Merion Township announced plans to build a trash incinerating plant on land directly adjacent to the Penshurst estate. Angered by what he saw as yet another venal act by the Township and dismayed by the spiraling cost of the estate’s upkeep, Roberts had the main house demolished and its contents sold at auction. The Penshurst gardens endured as an overgrown but evocative ruin until the mid-1970s when the site was bulldozed and regraded for residential development. Only the triple-arched garden gate and a handful of outbuildings remain as a hint of Penhurst’s vanished splendors.
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