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The Reverend Richard E. Sykes, minister of the First Universalist Church, built this two-story Colonial Revival mansion of pale brick. The second owner, Meredith Nicholson, wrote the suspense novel The House of a Thousand Candles (1905), using the house as a setting. The Nicholsons added the semicircular two-story solarium to the south, echoing the curve of the columned entry porch on the west. They had carved into the mantelpiece words from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The ornament of the house is the guests who frequent it.” After stints as a rooming house and a halfway house, the building was restored as a school for maids and butlers.