The mansion was finished in 1728. At the start, the family occupied the beautiful spot for a summer resort. Many times its master rode from Philadelphia on his finely-bred horse to superintend the clearing of fields, the planting of fruit trees and the setting out of rare shrubs for landscape effects. His pride was aroused in laying out and adorning with hemlocks an avenue which was to be the grand approach to his mansion. While out in the wilderness west of the Susquehanna surveying his possessions, the beauty of the native hemlocks amazed him so forcibly that he gathered, with his own hands, one hundred young trees, and upon his return to Dorminghurst in the autumn had them re-planted for the glory of his own handiwork. Hawthorns, walnuts, hazels and fruit trees sent out by William Penn from England found appropriate spots each year for the embellishment of James Greydon’s home. Nature had provided Dorminghurst with many attractive features. The primeval forest of oaks, elms and maples needed only the exercise of taste and the use of artistic judgment to convert the undulating natural landscapes into lasting impressions of the beautiful. To cull out the obtruding exuberance of the primitive woodland was a triumph of art. To create a vista of the rivulet, Wingohocking, crooking up a little valley, and to present expanding miles of swelling meadows over which grazed sleek cattle, sometimes resting under a lone magnolia or a group of beeches, were passions in the heart of a devotee of Virgil’s Georgics. The sloping of the ground in all directions from the site of the mansion-house allowed the broad avenue between the hemlocks to curve around each side of the buildings. One way a serpentine road descended through a dense wild-wood grove, and then meandered through the gully, giving perspectives or vistas through the shadowy treetops; the other way skirted enclosures for fruits and esculents on one side, and on the other passed broad lawns rising and falling in harmony ’midst the clumps of spruces, pines and firs. The development of a family seat in the early Colonial times aroused all the latent energies and pride of its founder. All the true domestic instincts found gratification in first choosing a picturesque location and then unfolding plans for landscape gardening. Problems arose. The manufacture of the brick, and the hewing of the timbers, from off the proprietor’s own soil, the construction of a mill on the stream to grind his own grain, and the building of his smoke-house, brew-house, a place for his loom, his dairy, and his ashery, rounded out the domestic economy of a Colonial gentleman.