This Federal house is one of the few remaining within the city limits of the small farmhouses built during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the hinterlands beyond the compact part of Providence. Its two-stage construction is best understood by viewing the three parts which step down the hill from the corner of Sharon Street. Initially the house consisted of the one-story, center-chimneyed middle section facing south. At the beginning of the nineteenth century an in-line kitchen ell extended it toward the rear of the property, and a narrow, two-story addition, right angled to the mid-eighteenth-century nucleus, enlarged it toward Eaton Street. The new front is plainly treated, with a transom-lit, entablature-capped door, but with moldings of some delicacy. Its complement of auxiliary structures is unusually complete, including a well, a corncrib, a shop, a wagon and woodshed, and even a schoolhouse at the rear of the lot.