Henry Lynch was a prosperous dry goods merchant on Downtown's Market Street in 1865 when he purchased seven acres of land in the East End from Harriet Winebiddle. Her father-in-law, John Conrad Winebiddle, had owned about 500 acres there.

By 1872, there were two houses on the land Mr. Lynch bought, including a sumptuous Second Empire-style brick mansion that changed hands nine times over the next 136 years. By 1895 it was the Ursuline Young Ladies Academy; a century later it was Victoria Hall, site of weddings and other special events. Since 2003 it's been the Waldorf School, a private school for children from infancy through fifth grade.

A building with so many owners and additions -- porches, solarium, dining hall, chapel -- just about begs to have its story told. So the school's facilities manager, Brendan Froeschl, suggested it as a research project to Drew Armstrong, head of the University of Pittsburgh's Architectural Studies program.

Mr. Armstrong wanted his junior and senior students to have a capstone preservation course that would challenge them; he invited Jeff Slack, preservation planner at Pfaffmann + Associates, to design and teach it. The result was an intensive 12-week program that turned nine students into house detectives for the summer and gave them a taste of what it's like to be preservation consultants in the real world. Their goal was to prepare a historic structure report so that ultimately the building could be nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, for which it has been determined eligible.

"The challenge became how to get a high-quality, real-world product from students with little to no formal historic preservation background," said Mr. Slack, a Cornell preservation graduate who managed preservation and design projects for two decades in Washington, D.C.

"I knew that [the class] had to be highly structured, and that's when I got the idea to model it on the work that I do every day here at Pfaffmann," where he is producing a historic structure report on the August Wilson house.

"The students loved the thrill of the hunt," Mr. Slack said. "It was neat to see what discoveries they would come up with every day."

To share their finds, Mr. Slack created a Web site where they could post them, so everyone would be aware of the latest information. They soon found that even the most basic questions needed answers: When was the house built, for example, and by whom? And who designed it?

On a field trip to the county real estate office, where they learned how to do a deed search, they traced the property back to Mr. Lynch's 1867 purchase of seven acres for $11,150 from Winebiddle. They also learned that five years later, Mr. Lynch sold a one-acre parcel to iron pipe manufacturer William H. Smith for $22,500. They concluded from the increased value of the acre that Mr. Lynch must have built the house at 201 S. Winebiddle and sold the improved lot to Mr. Smith. But a later find in an unlikely source suggested a different conclusion.

In 1888, Adelaide Nevin wrote and published "The Social Mirror," a candid, highly opinionated and occasionally hilarious book that assesses the physical attributes, habits and estimated wealth of Pittsburgh's women of means. At the time, the house at 201 S. Winebiddle was owned and occupied by the family of Edward P. Godfrey and his brother-in-law, Charles Clark; the two men were partners in the paper sack firm Godfrey & Clark.

"Mr. and Mrs. Godfrey and their family live in the immense mansion built by Mr. Smith, the pipe manufacturer, on Winebiddle and Penn avenues," Ms. Nevin wrote. "Decidedly domestic, Mrs. Godfrey rarely goes out, except in response to calls of missionary or Church work (she is a Baptist), to which she is devoted. Their wealth would reach about the $300,000 figure. Misses Jessie and Hattie Godfrey, the daughters of the house, are both bright young ladies, the former a musician and the latter something of a beauty."

Ms. Nevin's attribution isn't definitive proof, but it comes from a credible source and, as Mr. Slack points out, the book is very nearly contemporaneous, written about 15 years after the house's construction, the exact date of which is still unknown. On that matter the house itself offered a clue: The interior door hinges, the students discovered, bear a patent date of 1869, indicating the house was completed sometime thereafter.

The Nevin book is one of more than 700 texts on Pitt's Historic Pittsburgh Web site, which the students used to access historical maps, city directories and biographical information about the house's early owners.

But the students didn't just let their fingers do the walking. Mr. Slack arranged several field trips and guest speakers, beginning with Carnegie Mellon University's Architecture Archives, where archivist Martin Aurand "gave us a great two hours on how to do quality research," Mr. Slack said. "That was the first week of class and he set the stage perfectly for what I wanted to do."

With the course covering both documentation and conservation techniques, other guest speakers included preservation architects Charles Uhl and Rob Pfaffmann, woodworker Doug Mock, and Bruce Midkiff, preservation construction specialist at Old Economy Village.

"We not only spent a lot of time looking at the history of the building and the people who lived there but also mortar analysis and how the building has physically changed and what is necessary to better preserve it," said Denise Duryea of Shadyside, a Pitt grad and hospital research assistant who took the class as preparation for a major career change: She plans to get a master's degree in architecture, focusing on sustainability. Since taking the class, she's decided to only consider schools that have a historic preservation program as a component.

Working as a group, in teams of three or four, or independently, students tackled hands-on assignments such as analyzing paint layers and woodwork, making measured drawings and surveying the conditions of windows in the house and chapel and rating them. Mr. Froeschl, Waldorf's facilities manager and a Belmont Technical College preservation graduate, developed a related Pitt course on window restoration, with four students working on the Waldorf School's windows.

Mr. Slack's students interviewed Joedda Sampson, who bought the Bloomfield building in 1993 and restored it, beginning with removing dropped ceilings throughout to reveal deep moldings. The house is remarkably intact, considering its long use as a school.

"Most importantly we examined the building itself," student Frank Ruffing said at a presentation of their findings to the media, Waldorf staff and neighbors on July 31 in the chapel, which they learned had been built in 1913 and designed by Carlton Strong.

"The experience of presenting to an audience and having media interviews was invaluable," Mr. Ruffing said several days later. "That made it much more intense than any other class I've ever taken."

Some questions will have to wait for next summer's class to tackle and add to the report, such as the identity of the house's architect. Philadelphia's Isaac Hobbs, who designed several large Second Empire-style homes in Pittsburgh, is the prime suspect.

As for this summer's students, Mr. Slack didn't cut them any.

"He was very demanding and was very involved in it himself," Mr. Ruffing said. "He was part of our group and pushed us pretty hard."

"They were really terrific," Mr. Slack said. "I already miss them."