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Albert L. Sayles House

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c. 1880. 43 Church St.

This Queen Anne residence, built for one of the mill-owning Sayles brothers, the dominant millowner in the village from 1853 until his death in 1898, exemplifies the usual characteristics of the style in its asymmetrical massing and sheathing in clapboard below with an exceptional mix of cut shingle ornamentation above to animate upper-story surfaces. A plain Palladian attic window in the front gable tops this layered elevation. Its grandest gesture, however, is a wraparound porch with a latticed railing and spindled arching under the eaves, with a balconied porch upstairs off a bedroom, fronted by more latticed railing in a contrasting pattern. This porch structure reveals influences from the traditional Japanese house as filtered through American carpentry and provides subtler evidence of the exotic strain in Queen Anne than the “Saracenic” porch of the Ernest Tinkham House in Harrisville ( BU18). Like the Tinkham House, this also closes a corridor edged with planting, which is here more roughly treated in accord with its rugged terrain. It once gave an overview of the mill below (as, in a less direct manner, did the elevated placement of Harrisville mill owners' houses over their factories).

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.

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