Scottish Links to Pennsylvania

Some new owners treasure the old name as a link to the house's history. In 1904, William and Jane Walker built Muottas, designed by Alden and Harlow, who used stone quarried on the Sewickley Heights site to create a grand Colonial Revival with a long, columned porch. When Cindy Giles and her husband, Harlan, bought the house about 10 years ago, a descendant of the Walkers, Cindy reports, "gave me a small piece of paper and said, 'This is what my great-great-grandfather wrote about the [name of the] house in his handwriting.' " On the paper, William Walker indicated the word "Muottas" had a double meaning to him and his wife. On their honeymoon, the Walkers had visited a place called Muottas in Switzerland (perhaps Muottas Muragl, where there's a train station, hotel and funicular near St. Moritz in the Alps). "Muotta means a little wooded hill," Giles said. In old High German, the word means hilly, U-shaped land. "That's exactly the landscape" around their house, Giles said. "It's a U-shaped hillside." Muottas is one of four houses associated with the family of Scottish-born Hay Walker, who settled in what is now Brighton Heights. In the 1850s, Walker and his wife, Janet Charters Walker, built a brick Italianate villa near what is now the corner of California and Termon avenues.

They named it Bonnie Blink -- "pretty view" in Scottish -- and in it raised three daughters and five sons. One of them, William, later moved there with his wife, the former Jane Wilson -- the couple who eventually built Muottas. The house later was moved to nearby Morrell Street, where it still stands. The Walkers' daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband James Pontefract, lived in a Longfellow and Harlow house that miraculously survives on Lincoln Avenue in Allegheny, just behind the McDonald's on Brighton Road.

In 1894, they commissioned Longfellow, Alden and Harlow to build their summer home along Little Sewickley Creek Road in Edgeworth. Bagatelle, meaning "a trifle or something of little importance," was and still is something a bit more, with 2-foot-thick walls of imported Scottish stone. Bagatelle also is the name of the magnificent former country house of the governor of Barbados. The Barbados Bagatelle, built of coral stone in 1645, is said to have gotten its name in 1878, when a former owner lost it in a card game and shrugged off his defeat, saying, "It is just a bagatelle." In 1902, Elizabeth Pontefract's brother, Samuel Walker, commissioned Rutan and Russell to build another house on adjacent family land overlooking Little Sewickley Creek. Clad in random stone and melding Colonial Revival and Arts and Crafts influences, the house was named for a rock on the land that looks like a pulpit, from which Indian chiefs are said to have addressed their tribes. Both the house and the legend still stand.