Andalusia: Nicholas Biddle's Greek Revival Gamble
Near Trenton, Pennsylvania
On the Delaware River bank in Bensalem, Bucks County, the Andalusia estate anchors one of the most remarkable American stories of wealth, architecture, and financial catastrophe. The original house dates to seventeen ninety-four. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, architect of the United States Capitol, enlarged it in eighteen oh six.
But the estate's defining chapter came under Nicholas Biddle, who married into the property in eighteen eleven. Biddle was president of the Second Bank of the United States and Andrew Jackson's most formidable financial opponent. He hired architect Thomas U.
Walter to expand the house again in the eighteen thirties into a magnificent Greek Revival mansion. When Jackson destroyed the Bank in eighteen thirty-six, Biddle's fortune collapsed along with it. Andalusia was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-six, a tribute to the architecture that outlasted the financial empire that paid for it.
