Earl, Thomas, House

The significance of the Thomas Earl house is two-fold: It is one of the best (i.e most high style and substantially built) and best preserved of the small number of front-gable, Greek Revival houses remaining in Ann Arbor. The house's side-hall plan, front-gable form reflects the northeastern United states origin of many of the town's early settlers and the culture they brought to Ann Arbor and the Washtenaw County area with them. The house also possesses importance in terms of ethnic history in the Ann Arbor context as a reflection of the city's and area's early Irish settlement. Thomas Earl seems a representative example of the early Irish settlers in the area in terms of his relative affluence at the time of arrival in the 1830's (he was able to buy a substantial piece of property immediately on his arrival) and later success.

The Earl House is a 2 and 1/2 storey brick side-hall plan Greek Revival gable-fronter with axial orientation at a right angle to the street's direction. It has a one-storey shed-roofed clapboard extension across the back of the main block, and a later flat-roofed aluminum-sided wing, also of one storey, has been added behind that. The east-facing facade of the house is distinctive for the quality and variety of its classical details. The deep cornice returns are typical of the Greek Revival style, and the entry has rectangular transom and sidelights divided by white painted wood trim which is boldly rounded and mitred at the vertical/horizontal joints. All windows in the main block have six-over-six double-hung sash, many with their old glass panes intact, and they still have old green-painted shutters. Slightly asymmetrical in their piercing pattern, the lintels on the first and second floors appear to be full entablatures of cut stone, painted white and shaped to match the interior window and door surrounds. Their central "points" extend into embryonic crossetts on the lower two storeys, but the single window under the gable on the third storey has a flat-topped stone lintel. Throughout the main block, the original brick masonry demonstrates a high degree of the mason's skill, and the mortar is unusually light in color. Local wisdom places the earliest brickworks in Ann Arbor within a few blocks of the house, and the bricks are of an unusually small size, very evenly laid. Like many of the earliest dwellings in Washtenaw County, the house has a foundation formed of split boulders, the largest of which support the corners of the house, and they are carefully fitted with a few rounded cobblestones for visual contrast. The front porch, which extends across the entire facade, appears for the first time on the 1908 Sanborn map. Constructed of wood, painted white, its one-storey hipped-roof is supported by four tapered round wood columns on square piers which are connected by a simple balustrade to wooden pilasters attached to the facade. A triangular pediment faced with fish-scale shingles shelters the opening across the entry, and the entire structure is visually anchored with a green-painted skirt-board of vertical lattice.