1891 brownstone mansion museum where a Revolutionary War general's burial cauldron is on display
356 W 6th St, Erie, PA 16507
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
General admission to the Hagen History Center campus; check the website for current rates and member pricing.
Access
Limited Access
Multi-story 1891 mansion with original staircases
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1891 · Richardsonian Romanesque Architecture · Erie County Historical Society Campus · National Register of Historic Places
The Watson-Curtze Mansion stands on West Sixth Street in Erie, Pennsylvania, a 17,000-square-foot Richardsonian Romanesque house completed in 1891. It was built for Harrison F. Watson, a paper manufacturer, and was designed with carved-stone exterior detailing, stained glass, and elaborate interior woodwork typical of the style.
After Watson's death the house passed to Felix Curtze, an Erie banker, whose family lived in it into the twentieth century. The Curtze family later gave the mansion to Erie County, and for decades it housed a planetarium and the county historical museum collections.
Today the mansion is the centerpiece of the Hagen History Center, the campus operated by the Erie County Historical Society. The society has expanded the site with additional exhibit buildings, and the mansion's period rooms are preserved alongside displays on Erie's industrial, maritime, and military past. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Among the museum's holdings is an iron cauldron connected to General Anthony Wayne, the Revolutionary War officer who died at the Erie blockhouse in 1796 and was first buried there. Years later his remains were exhumed for reburial closer to his family in eastern Pennsylvania; according to the long-recounted local account, the bones were separated from the body by boiling in such a kettle for transport. The cauldron's display gives the museum a direct link to one of Erie's most retold colonial-era stories.
Sources
The haunting story attached to the Watson-Curtze Mansion centers on its most unusual artifact: an iron cauldron tied to the remains of General Anthony Wayne. Wayne died at Erie in 1796 and was buried at the blockhouse near Presque Isle. About thirteen years later his son arranged to move the body to the family plot in Radnor, in eastern Pennsylvania. The traditional account holds that because the journey was long, the bones were separated from the remaining flesh by boiling them in a kettle, with the bones carried east and the rest reburied at Erie.
The cauldron now displayed at the museum is presented in connection with that account. Visitors and local ghost-story collections report that the kettle is said to rattle or move on its own after hours, the disturbance attributed in folklore to the general's divided burial. Erie-area haunted-site listings include the mansion on that basis.
The Erie County Historical Society presents the Wayne material as documented local history rather than as a ghost attraction, and the paranormal claims circulate mainly through regional folklore rather than the museum's own programming.
Notable Entities
Self-guided and docent-supported admission to the Watson-Curtze Mansion and the surrounding Hagen History Center campus operated by the Erie County Historical Society. Visitors tour the period rooms of the 1891 brownstone and the museum's local-history exhibits, which include the iron cauldron tied to the reburial of General Anthony Wayne.
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