Servoss House

About this property

The Servoss House is a located on Fruit Avenue (Orleans County Route 41) in the town of Ridgeway, New York, United States, near Medina. It is a Greek Revival style home built between 1830 and 1833 alongside the Erie Canal. It has an unusual structural system consisting of stacked horizontal wooden planks, similar to that used by the contemporaneous Benjamin Franklin Gates House in Barre. It remains mostly intact today. In 2008 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The house is located on a 10-acre (4 ha) lot on the east side of Fruit where it bends westward at the canal and becomes Dublin Road. It is roughly one mile (1.6 km) west of Medina, midway between the village and the Niagara County line. To the south of the house, on an embankment along the north bank of the canal, is the Canal Trailway, a public path for pedestrians and bicyclists on the canal's former towpath. Across the canal is Telegraph Road (NY 31E), the main route between Medina and Middleport to the west. Other houses are across Fruit Avenue, slightly to the north. Around the house are mature maple and locust trees. There are large lawns in front and back; a driveway leads back to Fruit from the north (rear) of the house. In the woods to the northeast is an old smokehouse, considered a contributing resource to the house's historic character. The remainder of the property is wooded, with pines joining the hardwoods. Most of the surrounding area is wooded, giving way to worked fields to the north and east. The house itself has a two-story, three-bay main block with wings on either side. All sections are sided in clapboard and have asphalt roofs. The main block and two-story east wing have hipped roofs; the one-and-a-half-story west wing is gabled. A small gabled garage wing projects north from the east wing. Its structural system is referred to variously as horizontal-plank frame, stacked plank or plank-to-plank. The clapboard is affixed to layers of planks stacked solid. Usually 2-by-6-inch (5.1 by 15.2 cm) planks were used, staggered to form a plaster key (fastening). They are spiked or pegged together at the corners, windows, doors and other spaces. At the corners of the south (front) facade, wooden Doric pilasters, their capitals starting at the architrave line created by the simple wooden lintels on the second-story windows, frame the building. Above the windows is a wide frieze where paired brackets support overhanging eaves. Both wings have hipped-roof full-length porches. They are supported by hand-turned Doric columns with molded capitals. The east wing roofline is also bracketed.

Location

Categories

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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