WYOMING, Pa. — On your travels around the Wyoming Valley, you may have passed by a home known as the Swetland Homestead on Route 11 in Wyoming.
"The Swetland family, their fingerprints are on everything in the area from the original Forty Fort, to the battle of Wyoming, the immediate aftermath, to the Wyoming Monument to Diamond Manufacturing which was originally the Wyoming Shovel Works, Wyoming Seminary which was the first co-educational boarding school in the United States of America. You cannot go anywhere in this valley without finding something that the Swetlands had their hands in," said Mark Riccetti of the Luzerne County Historical Society, which now owns and operates the home as a museum.
Now the house that's more than 200 years old needs more than $400,000 worth of renovations to its exterior.
"We are doing everything we can to keep this historically accurate. And we had some people from the National Endowment for the Humanities came several years ago and did a study and made all the recommendations about what had to be done to restore the house, and we finally just got started," Mary Walsh of the Luzerne County Historical Society.
Restorations at the Swetland Homestead in Wyoming were scheduled to begin in April, but we're pushed back because of the coronavirus.
"We've sort of been hanging on. Then, of course, when it came time to order materials because you don't want to order the materials until it's time to start, we're in the middle of hurricane season. So you know it's a little harder to acquire materials when people need to rebuild their houses. But thankfully, we're here now. And we're up against the clock with winter," said Riccetti.