Robert S. Burrough, Jr.–Senator Nelson W. Aldrich House
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Museum of Rhode Island History, Rhode Island Historical Society (Robert S. Burrough, Jr.–Senator Nelson W. Aldrich House)
1822, John Holden Greene; 1905, Stone, Carpenter and Willson; 1975, museum conversion. 110 Benevolent St. (corner of Cooke St.) (open to the public)
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(Photograph by Andrew Hope)
Built as a two-story house for a customs officer, this must then have resembled Greene's other houses of the period. It was probably expanded somewhat later in the century for Samuel Noyes. Its present appearance, however, records its occupancy for seventy-five years by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich and his family as their Providence residence. For the senator, Edmund Willson added the third floor with its modified repeat of the centered Palladian window below and the Tuscan-columned side porch to echo the front porch, and did considerable interior work as well. (Much of this in the principal downstairs rooms was revamped for museum use, but Willson's ballroom addition and remodeled upstairs bedrooms remain mostly intact.) Around the same time Willson also worked on Senator Aldrich's vast bayfront estate in Warwick, Indian Oaks, which eventually provided the senator with an even grander summer escape.
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