Smith-Culhane House
National Register of Historic Places

Smith-Culhane House

Port Austin, Huron County, Michigan
Listed
September 23, 2001
Type
Building
Period
Modern
Ref No.
01001015

About this property

The Smith-Culhane House is a private house located at 8569 Lake Street in Port Austin, Michigan. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. It was previously operated as a bed and breakfast, the Lake Street Manor, but was converted back to a private residence in 2021. Richard Smith was born in Roxburghshire, Scotland 1840 and immigrated to Peterborough, Ontario in 1857. He moved to Auburn, New York three years later, and then to Port Austin in 1865. Smith purchased a 120-acre parcel of land, and was elected Huron County Surveyor in 1866 and county register of deeds and clerk in 1868. In 1870 he purchased the plot of land on which this house sits, and likely built the house in about 1871. In 1873, the Huron County seat moved to Bad Axe, and Smith, still serving as register and clerk, moved with it. When his last term ended in 1877, he moved back to Port Austin. In 1883, he returned to Bad Axe, and sold this house to Cornelius Culhane in 1885. Cornelius Culhane was born in Ireland in 1842, and moved to the United States as a young man. By 1871 he had moved to Port Austin, married Ellen Kennedy, and purchased farmland, but was soon working as a logger, running a logging outfit that contracted to sawmills to cut over timber lands. By the mid-1880s, Culhane was logging near Higgins Lake with a crew of one hundred men, and by the 1890s he was working in the Upper Peninsula. He was killed in 1903 in a logging accident. The Culhanes apparently used this house as their home when they were not working a logging camp. Ellen Kennedy Culhane continued to live in the house until her death in 1923, after which their son William owned it until his death in 1930. The house remained in the In 1985, Jack and Carolyn Greenwood purchased the house and opened it as a bed and breakfast. They closed their doors in 2021, and it is now a private residence owned by the Logans. The Smith-Culhane House is a 1-1/2 story Late Victorian T-shaped house with reddish-orange brick walls and a high gable roof. The gables and eaves have curvilinear vine-like bargeboards. Windows are one-over-one units, and have brick segmental-arched caps, as do the two front entrances. Two brick-walled slant-sided bay windows push out from the main body of the house.

Location

8569 Lake St.
Port Austin, Huron County, Michigan
44.04313, -82.99473

Categories

ARCHITECTUREINDUSTRY
National Register nomination ›
Sources

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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Nearby Historic Sites

Learned, Charles G., House
Industrial
0.1 mi
Winsor and Snover Bank Building
Civil War
0.1 mi
Port Austin Reef Light
Industrial
2.8 mi
Grindstone City Historic District
Listed
5 mi
Huron City Historic District
Listed
8.1 mi

Questions about this property

When was Smith-Culhane House listed on the National Register?

Smith-Culhane House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 23, 2001.

What type of historic resource is Smith-Culhane House?

Smith-Culhane House is classified as a building in the National Register of Historic Places.

What is the period of significance for Smith-Culhane House?

The period of significance for Smith-Culhane House is recorded as the modern era.

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