A Georgian house on East State Street, nestled among the millionaires’ mansions of a generation earlier. This one was probably built in the 1920s or 1930s, when the Colonial Revival was taking on a more historically accurate form: it would look at home in Annapolis or Williamsburg.
Elizabeth E. Haywood was a rich widow who hired Owsley & Boucherle to design this comfortable mansion for her, which was built in 1901. When she died in 1924, she left the house to be a home for retired Presbyterian ministers and their wives—an important charity in the days when ministers usually lived in manses provided by their churches, and had nowhere to go when they retired. The parts that were originally wood have been covered with cheap materials, but the general form of the house is still intact.
This was a very modern-looking house when it was built in the 1890s. The style is a large version of what old Pa Pitt calls the center-hall foursquare, with Renaissance details and a whiff of the Prairie Style wafting in from the west.
New windows and siding have not been kind to this Shingle-style house, but the picturesque composition of gables, dormer, and oversized turret comes through anyway. It was built in about 1891.
Charles H. Owsley designed the Buhl mansion, and he festooned it with every doodad in the Richardsonian Romanesque vocabulary. His festooning was done with taste, however, and the dormers, turrets, arches, and other outcroppings all make a harmonious composition.
A generously sized porte cochere always makes a good impression on visitors.