Curtiss, Charles G., Sr., House

The Curtiss House is one of Plymouth's most outstanding Late Victorian houses. The house was built probably in 1890 for and probably by Charles G. Curtiss, Sr., a Plymouth builder about whom almost nothing is known. His gravestone and the certificate of death indicate that he was born in Connecticut on March 25, 1823 and died in Plymouth on May 30, 1893. Several brief newspaper notices in the Plymouth Mail in the 1887-91 period show that he was involved in building and moving houses and that he was the Noble Grand of the local Odd Fellows lodge in June, 1891, and was a member in August, 1891, of the local board of review charged with reviewing a special assessment roll. Following Mr. Curtiss's death, his wife Caroline continued to own the house until 1901. The house's primary importance, in view of the lack of information about Mr. Curtiss, is architectural. Its rich exterior overlay of Italianate, Second Empire, and Eastlake elements is unique in Plymouth. The house is also the only example in Plymouth of the gabled-ell house form having a tower in the angle. This house form had been popular in Michigan and across the nation since the 1850s, but it was becoming very much out-of-date by 1890. It is as if Mr. Curtiss, assuming that he played a major role in designing his own house, used in its construction ideas that he had gathered over many years of house-building.

The Charles G. Curtiss, Sr., House stands on Union Street near the city hall, library, and historical museum, just north of Plymouth's central business district, and faces southeast. Standing on a fieldstone foundation, the house is a two-story, cross-gable-roof, wood-frame, gabled-ell building with a one-story, hip-roof, rear section. A square-plan tower in the angle of the L projects a little less than half its depth forward of the facade of the ell and rises three stories. It is capped, above a bracketted cornice, by a mansard roof with a gabled dormer in each face. The exterior, clad in clapboarding and patterned shingling, displays a shed-roof, Eastlake, turned-post verandah, with spindlework frieze, fronting the tower and ell, and stickwork gable ornaments with semi-round undersides. At the back of the verandah, the front wall of the ell displays a treatment of rectangular wood panelling. A slant-sided bay window with pent roof projects from the front of the upright at the lower-story level, while a substantial shed roof with concave upper surface hoods a tripartite window above it. The house's exterior is clapboarded to the tops of the first-floor windows. A band of vertical, tongue-and-groove boarding, capped by a projecting molding, extends around the exterior between the first- and second-story windows. A banded treatment of hexagonal, staggered-butt, and regular shingling clads the second-story and tower facades above this vertical-board band. Projecting semi-round-bottom gables of identical design on the front, rear, and one end display chamfered-edge stickwork defining recessed panels pierced by circles and plant and other forms. Beneath the gable ornaments, the gables themselves are clad in vertical boarding -- with lower ends slanting at forty-five degrees -- and patterned shingling near the apex. A one-story, hip-roof wing with shed-roof extensions on each side forms the back portion of the house. It displays modern picture windows and a screened-in porch. A wood deck fronts the house's rear entrance. These alterations are not visible from the house's front. The house displays a central-hall plan, with the long lower run of the double-run staircase against the hallway's left-hand or northwest wall. The parlor occupies the ell's first floor, with a sitting room and dining room, separated by double pocket doors, in the front and rear, respectively, of the upright's first story. The back of the house contains the kitchen and a breakfast room/pantry. The house retains its original main staircase, with square-plan, chamfered-edge newell and turned-baluster railing and its molded door and window trim with bullseye-decorated corner blocks.