beautiful ornamental gardens
behind the houses, situated for
the privacy and enjoyment of the
homeowners in their backyards. personal letters, the properties
are commonly referred to by
name rather than by
house number.
You may be inclined to stop
to chat with homeowners you
encounter along Main Street. Yes,
the natives are friendly, and they
are all house-proud about their
neighborhood. For strangers,
though, it can get confusing since
the locals refer to these houses by
name, not by number. You’ll hear
them casually mention the Pew
House, Elmo’er, Skinner Cottage,
Lyman House, and others. In
captions on images from the
turn of the last century and in As you walk along this side of
Main Street, it’s fun to see how
many incongruous architectural
details you can find: a classical
Georgian-style door frame on
a house where a suggestion of
Victorian tracery has been added
to thin porch columns; another
house has an elegant double-
bracketed cornice on the gable
ends that hint at Italianate-style,
yet, the rest of the house is
wrapped in an enlarged veranda.
Trying to figure out how some
of these older houses have been
transformed over time is what
makes them interesting. The
residence at 3467 Main Street
has imposing triple columns at
the entrance, deeply fluted and
with Ionic capitals, mirrored by
more fluting on the pilasters
surrounding the front door.
The heaviness of the columns
on the ground floor is contrasted
by a wee bit of tracery in the
windows on the upper story
dormers, which are interestingly
mismatched.
The original parts of the Lyman
House at 3485 Main Street date
to 1790, and records show it
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