Perry McAdow House

The McAdow House is of architectural significance as a well-preserved Victorian mansion with elaborate period interiors. The house was built in 1891 for Mr. and Mrs. Perry W. McAdow on then fashionable Cass Avenue.

The architect remains unknown although it is almost a certainty that a professional was employed to design the house. The McAdows were a colorful pair. Not unlike other nouveaux riches of the period, the McAdows built this house in Detroit as an entree into Detroit society. Perry McAdow had made a fortune gold-mining in Montana.

By all accounts, a shrewd and ambitious woman, Mrs. McAdow managed the couple's business interests from their modest beginnings in the 1860s and was instrumental in accumulating their great wealth. Late in life, Mrs. McAdow evidently aspired to a greater social sphere than was available to her in Billings, Montana.

In 1891 she came to Detroit and acquired the half block between Prentiss and Forest on Cass Avenue and began the construction of her new home. Her husband remained temporarily in Montana. The new house was sited at the Prentiss Avenue end of the 800-foot lot and elaborate gardens were laid out extending north to Forest Avenue. The house and carriage house reportedly cost $65,000 to build and were extensively described in a feature article written in 1894 and published in the Detroit Sunday News Tribune shortly after the mansion opened.

The detailed description of the house makes it clear that a decorator was employed to finish the interior, although Mrs. McAdow is credited with the decorating in the newspaper article.

The McAdow House is located on the northwest corner of Cass and Prentiss Avenues in Detroit about one-and-three-fourths miles from the central business district. It is set back from the corner about thirty feet behind a landscaped lawn. The neighborhood was previously an upper class residential area of large Victorian single-family houses built in the 1880s and 1890s. Most of these have been replaced with light industrial buildings, old tenements, and educational facilities.

A block north of the house is the campus of Wayne State University. The former garden of the McAdow house is occupied by the Neo-Gothic style Universalist Church of Our Father built in 1914. The house is used as the church parish house. The McAdow House is a 2 1/2-story, hip-roofed, red-brick-and-brownstone, rectangular building of Renaissance Revival design.

The essentially boxy shape is articulated on the exterior with bay windows, Corinthian-columned porches and loggias, stone belt courses, parapet balustrades, and a modillion cornice. The fenestration consists of large round-head single sash plate glass windows with transoms on the first floor, similar square head windows on the second floor, both with contrasting brick quoin surrounds, and large brick dormers in the steep slate roof topped with elaborately carved classically ornamented shell-topped pediments.