Quincy House Tour

1231mn

1231

1231 Maine Street is an excellent example of the variety of house design accomplished during the Queen Anne years of the late nineteenth Century. Known as a Townhouse style, houses like these would have been seen in Chicago and St. Louis during the same time period. What makes them different than a picturesque Queen Anne is the prominence given to the front facade. Often these houses were situated on a long, narrow city lot and the architect was not able to manipulate the plan to allow for long wrap-around porches and undulations in the facade. The result was often a finely detailed home that sat close to the street and had a front portico with a three or four sided bay beside it. Although this house sits in a more suburban setting, the lot is still rather narrow and a house of this configuration is actually quite successful here.

The majority of the house is built of a light brown brick, an unusual color for the Quincy area. Typically bricks in the majority of area homes were of a red tint, which suggest that the bricks for this house might have been brought in from somewhere else. Along the upper third of the second story is a saw-tooth brick detail that adds texture to the smooth brick surface.

The house has a large hip roof that sits atop a classical cornice with over-scaled brackets. The cornice unifies the front facade and establishes a relationship with the portico below. The portico itself is supported with ionic columns, three across, and has a coffered ceiling. In ancient architecture, columns would never have been placed in an odd number, but the attention to all the rules of a classical style were often overlooked in the nineteenth century. The front bay is ornately decorated in wood with large brackets that support the cornices on the first and second levels. The house is currently painted white, but newly built would have most likely been of a more colorful paint scheme.