224 North Second Street

224 North Second Street is a three-story brick house at the corner of Second and Race streets, built between 1870 and 1880 and divided today into six apartments. For most of its first forty years it was home to two households in turn: the family of Myer Strouse, the Bavarian-born congressman who died here in 1878, and then, for twenty-five years, the physician Dr. Mary Alice Swayze, whose home and surgery it was. A boarding house followed, and by the early 1920s the Salvation Army’s Pottsville corps. The house still stands much as the 1891 fire-insurance surveyor drew it: three stories of brick on a small corner lot.

The corner of Second and Race

Second Street runs a block west of Centre here. Farther north it reaches the Schuylkill County Courthouse and, behind it on Sanderson Street, the county prison of the Molly Maguire era. The 1891 Sanborn survey draws the corner in detail: a three-story brick dwelling, color-coded masonry and marked “D.,” with a public cistern in the street outside and, across narrow Race Street, open ground the surveyor labeled “Old Grave Yard” — the block behind the Centre Street Grammar School, today the county Historical Society.

The Strouse household, 1871–1881

The house’s documented record opens in the borough’s directories. Boyd’s for 1871 lists “Strouse Myer, lawyer, 307 Centre, h 32 N Second,” and the 1873 edition repeats it; the 1875–76 edition carries the same household at “h 224 N Second,” the borough having renumbered its streets in between. Myer Strouse had been brought to Pottsville from Bavaria as a boy in 1832, in a Jewish family; he edited a Philadelphia farm weekly, joined the Schuylkill County bar in 1855, and served two terms in Congress, 1863–1867. After Congress he returned to his Pottsville practice; his later service as counsel for accused Molly Maguires in the Bloomsburg Rea-murder trials is set out in his biography.

He died in this house on February 11, 1878 — “at his home in Pottsville, of liver complaint,” the notices record, at four o’clock in the afternoon, aged fifty-two. His widow carried the household on. The 1877 directory had already listed “Strouse Catharine, Mrs., grocer, 22 N Centre, h 224 N Second” — her store downtown, her home at this corner — and the 1881 edition still finds her here, the grocery now at 225 South Centre, with her son Myer Jr., a student, and a domestic, Julia Shovlin.

The doctor’s house, 1886–1911

On March 2, 1886, the Republican announced: “Dr. M. A. Swayze will remove April 1st, to 224 N. Second St., formerly the Strouse residence, two squares from Market St.” Eight years after the congressman’s death the house was still placed by his name — and the notice fixes the doctor’s arrival nearly to the day.

Dr. Mary Alice Swayze came to the corner an established physician: the Schuylkill County Medical Society had elected her its vice-president the year before the move. For a quarter-century the house was her home and her office in one — “SWAYZE MARY ALICE, physician, 224 N 2d, h do,” the 1887–88 directory records, and the editions carry the entry through 1911. In April of that year the Republican reported her departure and the house’s sale: “Dr. Swayze has sold her residence, on N. Second Street, to P. J. Joyce.” The rest of her story is told in her biography.

Rooms, then a mission

After the doctor, the house turned multi-family. The 1913–14 edition lists the Devitt family — James, a laborer, and Margaret, a widow — with other tenants alongside. The 1919–21 edition names a keeper: “Kammerer Clara J. Mrs., boarding, 224 N 2d, h do,” her boarders listed around her.

By the 1922–24 edition the Salvation Army had brought its Pottsville corps to the corner — “Salvation Army, 224 N 2d” — from Minersville Street, where the directories had last listed it, and the 1926–28 edition lists the corps’ officer at the house itself: “Phillips Charles H., (Lottie M.), adjutant Salvation Army, 224 N 2d, h do.” The directories consulted here do not fix the corps’ departure; its longer county story, down to the present post on Sanderson Street, is told in that article.

In the district

When the Pottsville Downtown Historic District was entered on the National Register of Historic Places on March 1, 1982, the nomination’s inventory recorded this house as Survey No. 295, among the district’s contributive structures: “Three story brick Victorian eclectic, towne house, four bays wide. The first floor is composed of slightly altered openings as well as the second floor, the plain exterior leads up to the bracketed wooden cornice, built between 1870-80.” The bracketed cornice still crowns the building.

The county’s present record closes the arc: a two-section brick building — three stories in front, two behind — in apartment use, six units, at the corner of Second and Race.