Any time I pass a Victorian home with a corner tower, I feel a slight pang of jealousy. I imagine the interior walls lined with well-worn books and a comfy chair by the window. I’ve always longed for such a perfect reading nook.
Our house didn’t have a tower. At least not when we lived there. It used to have one when it was first built in 1871. Then a series of events led to its destruction.
The oldest photo I have of the house displays a steeply pitched hip roof with a corner tower topped by a pointed roof. It also has a wrap-around porch.1
In January 1941, careless servants allegedly caused an attic fire. Firemen spent three hours fighting a stubborn blaze that began when an overheated chimney flute, built to close wooden partitions, caught fire.2 Fortunately, they were eventually able to extinguish the flames.
The tower was severed just below the roof line. In making repairs after the fire, the owner made several renovations to alter the house more to her liking.3 She ripped out the porch (ostensibly to let more light in) and changed the high-gabled roof to a flat mansard roof.4 She never reinstated the top of the tower.
It wasn’t until I began researching the house that I realized it once had a tower. I also discovered these drawings in my Dad’s files.
Apparently, he had plans to bring the tower back. I don’t think he got much further than these sketches. I don’t recall him ever talking about it. Too many other critical systems needed attention first. Like the crappy plumbing. And the fried-to-smithereens electrical. Also the roof that leaked like a sieve. And the Everything Else that comes with a neglected old house.
So yeah. He never got around to rebuilding that tower.
As a kid, I never spent much time observing the house from the outside. That’s because I was living inside it. My memories of the interior are more vivid. Now, I study dozens of photos of the home’s exterior closely. I see the house differently.
I wish the owner had repaired the tower after the fire. I think the house would look much better. While the home is still grand, it’s missing some of that Victorian-era opulence without its flashy tower. It looks like a severed limb.
I can’t fault her. No one liked towers on their houses anymore in the ‘40s. Such decorative elements had long fallen out of favor.
This is according to Northwestern lecturer David Taylor, who writes the following in an essay about the rise and fall of Victorian homes.
By the time World War I rolled around… a severe esthetic backlash had set in against the elaborate decoration of the late Victorian period. It is precisely the same cornices and mansard roofs, the fantastic array of towers and wrap-around porches that we so admire today, that made the Edwardians scorn Victorian architecture.
It’s kind of a miracle that a giant rickety wooden house 1) even survived a 1941 fire and 2) didn’t get torn down after it did. Many other Victorian houses weren’t so lucky.
Again, David Taylor:
The rapidly industrializing America of 1870 to 1900 put up vast numbers of new houses, enough to hold tens of millions of people, and built with the style and color that only the Victorians could achieve. And then the next generation tore them all down. In one massive wave of destruction, lasting roughly from 1900 to 1940, our Victorian housing stock was almost completely obliterated.
What I find particularly interesting is that the owner added the mansard roof, which the house still has today. It’s what gives the house its Second Empire architectural style. She changed the roof from one Victorian-era style to another Victorian-era style. But then she made other changes to de-Victorian-ify the home, like removing the wrap-around porch and boarding up decorative elements around the windows. And of course, she never brought back the tower.
It’s kind of bizarre. After her renovations, the result was a house that looked Victorian… ish? It’s like she couldn’t make up her mind about which way she wanted to go.
When you buy an old home, you inherit all the previous owners’ decisions. In a 100+ year home, someone was bound to make changes at some point. For whatever time those people lived there, they made it their own. When they leave, the alterations they’ve made remain.
We all leave our mark on the places we’ve lived.
There also appears to be a greenhouse peeping out back. I’ve never found any mention of when that was removed or destroyed.
Her name was Mrs. Beach. She and her husband, E.C. Beach, owned the home from 1917-1964. In an interview about the house, my father once told a journalist the Beaches were “probably the only family in its history who had enough money to afford this place.”
A mansard roof has four sloping sides, each of which becomes steeper halfway down. The top is flat. They can be tiled or shingled and often feature dormer windows.
Betsy,
Hi! Do you know if the tile in the front entry is original to the home?
I'm mourning the loss of that gorgeous wrap-around porch!