Taylor House

U.S. Representative Edward T. Taylor fathered the Taylor Grazing Act, a major piece of New Deal legislation that reshaped the live-stock industry and much of the western landscape. The Taylor Act regulated live-stock grazing on public lands for the first time, stipulating that the U.S. Forest Service impartially rent grazing rights to cattle and sheep ranchers. This ended bitter sheep-versus-cattle wars and curbed environmental abuses such as overgrazing. Coloradans of the Western Slope reelected Taylor to the House of Representatives seventeen times, keeping him in office from 1908 until his death in 1941. After the city of Glenwood decided not to buy the Taylor home for $1 for use as a library and museum, it became an apartment house.

This overgrown four-square with third-story dormers and various bays is more important for its former occupant than its architecture. Numerous changes to the original design, as well as the addition of asbestos siding, have cheapened the house. The Colonial Revival front porch attempts elegance with its tri-clustered Tuscan columns and pilastered and pedimented entry, as does the elaborately carved foyer with its mahogany piers, brackets, spindles, and egg-and-dart trim. Far humbler cottages around Congressman Taylor's domicile include two vernacular Victorian cottages at 727 and 729 Bennett. A more polished four-square with a heavy Doric porch and Craftsman ornament is the B. T. Napier House (1912), 930 Bennett.