On your right, look for a three-story Roman-brick mansion shaped like an L, with a white Ionic porch wrapping around it and an elliptical fanlight over the front door.
This house feels like Aurora reaching full stride. Colonel Ira Clifton Copley didn’t arrive as an outsider showing off; he came to Aurora with his family in eighteen sixty-seven, went to local schools, studied at Jennings Seminary, and spent a lifetime turning local opportunity into real power. First he made his money in gas and electric service, then he switched tracks and bought the Aurora Beacon-News in nineteen oh five. That paper became the seed of the Copley Press empire, formally organized in nineteen twenty-eight, and along the way Copley also served in the U-S House of Representatives.
Architect Jarvis Hunt gave him a house that could carry all that weight. Finished in nineteen seventeen, it mixes Classical Revival grandeur with Federal-style finesse. That means big public gestures and crisp early-American detail: a porch with Ionic columns, the kind with curled capitals at the top, slim pilasters framing the entrance, and a fanlight, that half-oval window above the door, catching extra light. If you glance at the image in the app, you can see how the mansion presents itself almost like a civic building in domestic clothes.
Here’s the detail locals love to slip in... the family story didn’t end in politics or newspapers. Copley adopted William N. Copley in nineteen twenty-one, and that boy grew up here before heading to California. He kept the family name, but his life swerved into painting, writing, collecting, gallery work, and Surrealist art. So this mansion, for all its authority, also launched a wildly different creative future.
Copley even reached beyond Aurora in stranger ways. Not bad for a man who started in utilities.
And that’s the sweep of Aurora, isn’t it? Mills, hotels, lodges, banks, houses... together they tell a city forever remaking ambition into identity, then handing the story forward. You can visit this exterior anytime, since the site is accessible around the clock.
