Holmes-Tallman House

About this property

The Holmes–Tallman House was a large farmhouse with Carpenter's Italianate style located northwest of Jamesburg, at the corner of County Route 535 (Cranbury-South River Road) and County Route 522 (Rhode Hall Road, formerly Brown's Corner Road), in Monroe Township, Middlesex County, New Jersey. Also known as Brown's Corner House, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on September 12, 1979, for its significance in architecture. It was demolished on March 10, 2025. Built of wood, the Holmes–Tallman House features a three-story cubical main section with a two-story wing in the back; a one-story porch with eyelet jigsaw work spans the front and sides. Otherwise known as cubical Italianate architecture, the general design was popular in farming contexts. It has also sometimes been described as a Victorian mansion. A parlor runs the full depth of the house. The hip roof has a square cupola. A large kitchen was added to the rear of the house in 1870, in what would be the only structural addition the house would ever see; as such, the house found appreciation for having almost all of its original design characteristics still in place. The structure consists of twenty-two rooms overall, and has been measured at some 5,000 square feet (460 m2). The house was built c. 1860 by Francis Holmes, whose money came from agriculture. It was then purchased on September 10, 1870, by Jacob B. Tallman. He owned an investment firm in New York and built the structure as a summer house. What the original acreage was is unclear. The road the structure was on has had several names over time, such as Jamesburg-Dayton Road; subsequently the house would have the address 290 Rhode Hall Road. The house tended to overlook corn fields. By the 1970s, the house was owned by George and Gwen Baker. She was the great-granddaughter of Tallman, and the granddaughter of Minnie Tallman, who had lived there as well. Gwen Baker had lived in the house her entire life, and overall, six generations of the family before and after her lived in the house. The Holmes–Tallman House was added to the New Jersey Register of Historic Places in 1979, with a staffer for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection calling it an "outstanding example of a large square carpenter's Italianate farmhouse." Later that year, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. This would qualify the owners for a restoration grant if they were to open the house to visitors, but the Bakers told The Home News that they had no plan to do so. In any case, the house was well-preserved and in good operating condition, a state of affairs which continued into the 1980s. During this period, the house had twelve bedrooms, of which nine were furnished and three were used for storage. The domicile was full of antique furniture, family portraits, and other heirlooms of various sorts. The house was on a 26-acre (11 ha) plot of land.

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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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