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(Photograph by Curtis B. Johnson, C. B. Johnson Photography)
Carroll S. Page built this, the grandest house in Hyde Park village, with a fortune derived from a calfskin tannery that was claimed at the end of the nineteenth century to be the largest in America, if not the world. The tannery, located at the bottom of the bluff behind his homesite, was facilitated by the arrival of the Vermont section of the Portland and Ogdensburg Railroad in the 1870s. Expanding his interests into banking, lumbering, and then politics, Page served as governor from 1890 to 1892 and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1898. One of Vermont's finest Georgian Revival mansions, his house was sited just west of the county buildings on Main Street, its deep setback extending the sense of green public space at the core of the village. The hipped and clapboarded main block is picked out with a modillion cornice, a lattice-balustraded roof deck, and Ionic capitals on pilasters, porch columns, and a two-story rear loggia. Queen Anne touches include the variously shaped windows, a swelling pedimented entrance bay, and a semicircular porch on the angled service wing.
The house escaped the fire of 1910 through the use of most of the community's available water sprayed on its roof, surviving at the expense of much of the rest of the village. Though spared from flames, the house has suffered from cycles of neglect and restoration triggered by economic swings. A recent rehabilitation has added dormers to the front roof.