Blank Funeral Home (Boyd-Elliott House)

This imposing forty-four-room Second Empire mansion was the home of William Elliott, a regional railroad contractor. Railroading was the road to wealth in the nineteenth century, and even in the hinterlands the results could be opulent. Yet rural frugality survived as well: instead of demolishing the two existing buildings on the site, Elliott's builder combined them into an impressive architectural solution. The earlier eighteenth-century building at the back was amalgamated with the central-hall brick colonial house on King Street into a larger house with a four-story tower. The slate-covered mansard roofs and bracketed cornices act to draw the wings together in a convincing, if unruly, whole.