33RD ANNUAL HISTORIC HOUSE TOUR

Ogden East Central Bench Historic District

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Our 33rd Fundraiser TourThanks to generous community support and homeowners willing to open their homes for one day to the public, we will again raise funds that will be donated directly to preserving Weber County’s historic public places. Weber County Heritage Foundation is a 100% volunteer not-for-profit organization. Your contributions, including tour ticket purchases, are tax-deductible as allowed by law.

Please Join Us Saturday, September

11th from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Tickets $15 per person Purchase tickets at the

Eccles Community Art Center, located at 2850 Jefferson Avenue

Wattis House

Wattis HouseConstructed in 1914 and designed by noted Ogden architect Eber Piers (designer of the First Security Bank building on 24th and Washington), this house is one of Ogden’s many exceptional examples of the Prairie School style. Influenced by early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, this house demonstrates the extreme horizontality of the style with its very low hipped roofs, expansive overhangs, brick banding, and its graceful porte cochere and sunroom on the north and south that extend out from central block. Although employing relatively spare ornamentation, particularly compared to its Victorian forebears, the house is contains beautifully detailed and fabricated woodwork and exceptional art glass. Built for one of the founders of the Utah Construction Company (one of the firms responsible for Hoover Dam in Nevada), the house remains in the Wattis family, who recently conducted an extensive renovation of the property, restoring both the architecture and interior design and re-landscaping the grounds consistent with early 20th century garden design.

Travis & Shalae Larsen House

Larsen-McNutt HouseThis 1890 home was originally built by John W. McNutt, owner of J.W. McNutt and Company which was located on 25th Street. Mr. McNutt was also rumored to be a liquor dealer. The home's architecture is an example of Victorian Queen Anne style, with its large porch, asymmetrical massing and gabled silhouette, projecting bays, and elaborate exterior including turned columns, clapboard siding and shingles. Slated for demolition in 2002, the home was purchased by its current owners with the help of a rehabilitation loan from the Utah Heritage Foundation.. Shortly after work commenced, a fire tore through the dining room and up the east-side of the house, destroying the roof and attic. Determined to complete the project, the Larsens, with the help of Ogden City's Own in Ogden program, were able to continue the building restoration. The home is nearly completed, but ongoing projects, including painting and restoring the original turnings and fretwork to the porch, are a priority as the owners find the time and resources necessary to move forward.

Charles & Tamara Anderson

Anderson HouseLikely built around the first of 20th century, the Anderson House is transition design between the Victorian shingle-style and the emerging bungalow-style that would dominate Ogden architecture for the next 25 years. The bungalow was typically a one or one and half story house with a simple rectangular floor plan inspired by the verandah houses of India and popularized by the Arts and Craft movement that swept the United States around the turn of the last century. It evoked “comfort and sense of shelter” because of its deep porches, long overhangs, tucked-in dormers, use of shingles and exposed brackets and expressive eave details. This handsome home is a stately and unusual example of the style because of its size (bungalows were typically small) and elements that may have been more typical of the late-Victorian shingle style (the relatively steep pitch of the roofs and the use of shingles in the upper story and refined masonry of the lower story).

Patrick & Tracy Cross

Cross/ John L. and Elizabeth Dalton House

This house is rare Ogden example of the Second Empire style, which was popular in Utah in the last quarter of the 19th century. This style is named for the "French" elements in vogue in France during the era of the Second French Empire and the reign of Napoleon III. The characteristics of this style evidenced by this home are its rectilinear and symmetrical massing, the arched windows, and window dormers on the upper floors. Of course, its most distinct stylistic element is its Mansard roof, named for noted 17th century French Baroque architect Francois Mansart. The mansard is a hip roof characterized by two slopes (a steeper lower roof in combination with a shallower upper roof) that allows for a habitable area in the garret (attic) area of the building. This example is constructed of masonry load-bearing walls and uses Classical ornamentation in the wonderful frieze board under the roof cornice.

Robert Rhoads

Robert Rhoads HouseUnlike the other Queen Anne houses on this year’s tour, this one and half story house has a wonderful horizontality reinforced by its generous main roof gable and expansive front verandah. Exhibiting a relatively simple rectangular floor plan with a side passage entrance and stair hall, the symmetry of the house’s silhouette is counter pointed by the charming gable over the porch steps. Although relatively simple in materials, the main façade of the house is decorated by half-timbering the in the main roof pediment, scrollwork over the porch entrance, and an elaborate assembly of lathe-turned porch columns, balustrade and spindlework along the porch railing and structure. These smaller, more cottage-like examples of the Queen Anne-style were popularized by pattern and stylebooks available to both Ogden architects and builders during the last quarter of the 19 th century.

2850 Jefferson Avenue, Ogden – Please purchase tickets here

Eccles Community Art Center

Eccles Community Art CenterThis home, constructed in 1893 for Ogden businessman James Clarence Armstrong and design by Samuel Whitaker, is one of Utah’s largest and most accomplished examples of Queen Anne-style architecture. Jefferson Avenue was developed between 1882 and 1928 and was home to some of Ogden’s wealthiest founding families, acquiring the name “Bankers’ Row”. David and Bertha Eccles acquired the home in 1896 to create a home for themselves and their twelve children. Born into relative poverty in Scotland, David would become one of Utah’s first multi-millionaires. Remodeled in 1913 with the addition of the Prairie-style carriage house and sun porch, the house remained in the Eccles family until 1948 when it became a dormitory for nearby Weber College and then in 1959 the home for the Eccles Art Center. In 1998, the historic buildings were carefully restored and two new buildings were added (a new dance center and administrative offices for the Ogden Symphony Ballet Association) connected by a landscaped sculpture court.

Dan & Suzy Dailey

Dan & Suzy Dailey HouseThis house is an interesting example of the Victorian Queen Anne-style architecture, which was one of the most widespread and popular residential styles in the United States during the last half of the 19th century. Although based on the side passage plan characteristic of the Queen Anne (the front door and stair are asymmetrically located on one side of the building), this house is symmetrical in construction and appearance, axially organized around its single gable-ended roof. It also exhibits design elements more characteristic of the relatively rare (in Utah, at least) stick-style, a purely American style (according to architectural historian Vincent Scully) that emphasized the “truthfulness” of its construction through the use of expressed timber framing seen in the dramatic roof gable of the principal façade.

Dan & Penelope McKay House

Dan & Penelope McKay HouseThis charming house is a relatively quiet variation of the typically visual complexity characteristic of the Queen-style. Conceived at the height of the Industrial Revolution both in England and America, the Queen Anne variant of Victorian architecture is both highly romantic and highly eccentric. Ironically it was the machine age that allowed Victorian architecture to be one of the most pervasive styles up until that time: the emergence of architectural “pattern books”, the use of factory-made and precut ornamentation and the availability of materials via railroad all conspired to make the Queen Anne-style accessible and cheap. The McKay house is a straight forward version of this style. It exhibits the characteristic cross-wing plan, variety of material patterns and colors, lathe-turned woodwork, and decorative shingle patterns that, added with its asymmetrical façade, create a picturesque complexity that is the hallmark of this style.

Church of the Good Shepherd

Church of the Good ShepherdDesigned by noted English-born, Detroit-based architect Gordon W. Lloyd in 1878, the Church of the Good Shepherd (a parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Utah) is an excellent regional, ecclesiastical version of the Gothic Revival-style. Like its medieval English forebears of the 11th through 14th centuries, the Gothic-Revival style emphasizes verticality though steeply pitched roofs and narrow pointed windows and doors. Although primarily constructed of rusticated local stone, the church also uses decorative bargeboards and wooden architectural tracery consistent with the carpenter Gothic style. Additionally, this building is a very rare Utah example of the American architectural sub-style of Victorianism (coined by Yale architectural historian Vincent J. Scully) called the “Stick-style”, as demonstrated by the entry bay/vestibule, which incorporates the style’s paradigmatic exposed wood studs with diagonal board infill. The facility has had numerous expansions to the east and south, as recently as 2010.

Scowcroft Mansion

Scowcroft Mansion / Terra VentureBy the earlier 20th century, Victorian architecture was supplanted in popularity by a variety of new styles that either forshadowed modernism (including the craftsman and prairie styles) or drew inspiration from a wide range of historically based design traditions. This latter movement—broadly called Period Revivalism---represented a return to earlier popular American styles, including Colonial-revival, Federalist style, Georgian-revival and Neoclassicism. Constructed in 1909, the Scowcroft House is an excellent example of Colonial-revival residential architecture. Designed by architect Moroni Woods for Heber Scowcroft, this large home has a symmetrical floor plan anchored by central entrance and stair hall and elevated on a rusticated base. The detailing employs Neoclassical motifs including Corinthian capitals on the columns, the dentilled window surrounds, and the deep overhangs supported by ornamental modillions.

Toone House

Allen & Cindy Toone HouseThis wonderful house is an interesting example of the Victorian Eclectic style. Popular at the turn of the century, the expression is not usually considered a distinct style but rather a pastiche of other contemporaneous elements derived from other popular styles including the Queen Anne, Italianate, Moorish, and others. Having fallen under hard times during which the house was subdivided into multiple apartments and hidden by a large addition at the front, the house is currently being rehabilitated and restored as one of the premier pieces of residential architecture in the Jefferson District. The house has a wonderfully irregular, façade and roof silhouette that culminates in the highly remarkable entrance tower. Every inch of exterior surface has a remarkable sense of plasticity and texture, sheathed in ornamental masonry and fish-scale shingles and articulated by scrollwork, turnwork and other decorative elements.

Bibliography

Carter, Thomas and Peter Goss. Utah’s Historic Architecture, 1847-1940: A Guide. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1988.

Thank you to architect Robert Herman for the house descriptions

Introducing Tour Lecture Series Historic Lectures Scheduled for: 10 a.m., 11 a.m.

and noon at the Eccles Community Art Center

Richa Wilson, an expert in historic architecture, will discuss tour homes style development, typical characteristics, terminology and specific home features. This brief lecture and slideshow will help tour-goers understand what they are seeing so they can look for key architectural features during the tour.  

2010 Membership Drive

Become a member prior to or on the day of the tour and receive one free tour ticket for student (with current university ID) or individual memberships and two tickets for the family levels and above. The Weber County Heritage Foundation is a 100% volunteer not-for-profit organizations. All donations are tax deductible as allowed by law. Proceeds from the tour and membership dues are invested in the preservation of Weber County’s historic public places.

Thank you to our Tour Sponsors

And thank you to our Foundation’s volunteer board

Libby Norvell, PresidentConnie Cox, Vice PresidentBonnie Galbraith, SecretaryRussel King, TreasurerNick BreezeKen BurtonKay FeenyMary GalbraithBob GeierJohn HamptonTina Herman

Shalae LarsenKathryn MacKayJan MeikleJudy MitchellTravis PateDauna SeagerJim TorgheleRicha Wilson