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Rhode Island » Providence » College Hill and East Side » Benefit Street, South » Thomas Poynton Ives House

Thomas Poynton Ives House

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1806, Caleb Ormsbee. 1882–1883, exterior renovation, Stone, Carpenter and Willson. 1885–1890, garden, Frederick Law Olmsted. 66 Power St.
  • (Photograph by Patricia Lynette Searl)
  • Thomas Poynton Ives House (Richard W. Longstreth)
  • Thomas Poynton Ives House (Richard W. Longstreth)
  • Thomas Poynton Ives House (Richard W. Longstreth)
  • (Damie Stillman)

Up the hill at the corner of Brown Street is the Thomas Poynton Ives House, built for a niece of John Brown and her husband, who early became a partner in Brown family enterprises. It uses the same exterior format, without the projecting center; but walls and detailing are in the flatter and more delicate Federal style. Although the barn at the rear is contemporary with the main block of the house, the rear ell was added in the early 1880s and decorated by a porch and screening from Edmund Willson's design. At the same time he added the very fine semicircular porch at the front of the house (as he had redone the porch for Marsden Perry downhill), which immediately became the Providence model for a plethora of Colonial Revival variations, none as handsome as this. Willson also raised and extended a one-story semicircular bay on the garden side the full height of the elevation. Its walled Olmsted garden remains substantially intact. Inside (not open to the public), its Federal-period rooms, with some Neo-Federal remodeling, are interrupted by a library installed in the 1870s by the New York firm of Marcotte, a leading Victorian furniture and interior designer.

Writing Credits

Author: 
William H. Jordy et al.
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Data

What's Nearby

China Trade Mansions
President's House, Brown University
John Corliss–Edward Carrington House
Rhode Island Historical Society (John Brown House)
John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Culture (Joseph Nightingale–Nicholas Brown House)

Citation

William H. Jordy et al., "Thomas Poynton Ives House", [Providence, Rhode Island], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/RI-01-PR96.2.

Print Source

Buildings of Rhode Island, William H. Jordy, with Ronald J. Onorato and William McKenzie Woodward. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 90-91.

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