It is the ancestral summer home of Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the newly developed United States Forest Service (USFS) and twice elected governor of Pennsylvania.

His wife, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot, made substantial changes to the interior of the home and gardens, in collaboration with several different architects, during that time.

On the 303 acres (123 ha) of the combined parcels that made up the original estate, there are 48 total buildings, structures and sites, all but eight of which are considered contributing to its historic value.

These include nearby cottages known as the Letter and Bait Boxes, a unique outdoor dining facility called the Finger Bowl, a Forester's Cottage used as a residence by the Pinchot descendants, an open-air theatre, the former Yale School of Forestry's summer school, and a white pine plantation established by Gifford Pinchot.

Ficken added some of his own decorative touches to the house, such as the front door, interior paneling and wrought iron porches on the south and east facades.

Hemlock timbers were floated down the Delaware on rafts from Lackawaxen, and another river town, Shohola, provided the bluestone and windows.

Cornelia realized that Gifford's developing political career, and hers (she ran for Congress three times),[15] required a residence more suited to entertaining guests than it had originally been intended to be, and set about modernizing the house.

"The first thing my wife did", Pinchot told the Saturday Evening Post in 1922, "was to break down the partition walls and let in light and air ... [O]f course, it's a vast improvement.

Chester Holmes Aldrich first designed a swimming pool for the property, a raised structure enclosed on three sides by a pergola of stone piers and wooden trellises.

Next, in the late 1920s, when her husband was serving his first term as governor, came the Letter Box, a small cottage intended both as an archive for his papers and an office for his political staff when he was in residence.

In their last collaboration, Aldrich and Cornelia Pinchot added a moat, which finally gave the house the raised effect Hunt had originally intended.

[7] In the early 1930s, she hired William Lawrence Bottomley to create a unique addition known as the Finger Bowl, an outdoor dining area consisting of a raised pool surrounded by a flat ledge.

The agency intended to use the house as a conference center, and had to replace some interior walls that had suffered insect and water damage.

It developed a plan to restore the house and estate to a condition similar to the way it had been in Pinchot's era, in consultation with the Park Service's Harper's Ferry Center,[18] and hired staff with expertise in landscape and architecture.

[5][19] The state of Pennsylvania's Department of Natural Resources also made a $2 million grant available for renovations to the entrance, entry road and parking facilities.