The Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, or Benjamin Harrison Home, was the residence of the 23rd president of the United States Benjamin Harrison (1833 – 1901) and was raised, accommodating many elm and oak trees in its grounds, on what was at the time the outskirts of Indianapolis.
Built between 1874 and 1875, the Italianate 16-roomed house stands on North Delaware Street in the Old Northside Historic District of Old Northside, just outside the north boundary of Downtown. Once in place, Harrison spent his later life here save the time he served as senator (1881 – 1887) and President (1889 – 1893).
It was at the front of this house that he addressed listeners out on the street in what eventually became known as ‘Front Porch Campaign’ running for president in 1888, even though the portch itself was fashioned three years after he left office.
Harrison had the home refurbished and fitted with electricity as late as 1896, that is five years before he died, whilst the interior displays an oak-trimmed walnut staircase, butternut woodwork and parquet floors.
The beautiful Queen Anne-styled Pinney House, built in 1887, lies on the west side of Lima Street in the central-western quarters of Sierra Madre in Los Angeles County, southern California.
This elaborate beauty was designed and built by well-known brother architects Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom on account of former Civil War surgeon Dr. Elbert Pinney intended as a railroad hotel to accommodate East Coasters that arrived in great numbers during the Los Angeles land boom.
Among others, it has served as filming location for classic films such as ‘Great Man’s Lady’ (1941), starring Barbara Stanwick, and ‘The Seven Little Foy’s’ (1955), featuring Bob Hope.
The beautiful Italianate Guthrie Mansion, built in 1879, lies on Tunnelton Road on the east edge of the community of Tunnelton in southeast Lawrence County, southern Indiana.
It was raised by entepreuner Alfred Guthrie who made the most of the arrival of railway at Tunnelton and a fortune as he set up a general store that engaged the locals for miles around.
Nowadays, the mansion functions as a Bead & Breakfast (Guthrie Meadows BB).
The Second Empire-styled beauty of John Bremond House, built by contractor George Fiegel in 1886, at 700 Guadalupe Street between 6th and 7th Street shapes the centrepiece of the Bremond Block Historic District, Downtown Austin (Texas).
Original owner John Bremond Jr, hence the name, spared no expense and a hefty $49000 towards the building of his mansion that contains no less than five bedrooms while it displays fine plaster archways carved black-walnut woodwork on the interior as well as topped with a mansard roof and wrapped with wrought-iron balconies around.
The historic district is a Victorian upper-class patch that primarily takes in eleven historic houses, constructed between 1854 and 1910, lying within a square block bounded by West Seventh, West Eighth, Guadalupe and San Antonio Streets.
Six of those houses were built or expanded as residences for members of the families of prominent brothers John and Eugene Bremond whilst the district further extends over several houses located on the west side of San Antonio Street and the south side of West Seventh Street.
Nowadays, the John and Pierre Bremond houses are owned by the Texas Classroom Teachers Association with the former forming the headquarters thereof
Taos Pueblo (or Pueblo de Taos) is an ancient pueblo (town, village drawing on Spanish ‘pueblo’), probably founded around the late 14th or early 15th century AD, that belongs to a Taos-speaking (Northern Tiwa, a branch of local native American dialects) tribe of Puebloans.
It is located about a mile north of Taos, northern New Mexico, either side of Rio Pueblo de Taos (or simply Rio Pueblo, a tributary of Rio Grande) in the backdrop of the Taos Mountains, within the range of the Sangre de Cristo Range, and presents a fine example of Puebloan communities of the pre-Hispanic era stretching as far as our days.
The pueblo features two multi-storey stacked step-back adobe dwellings, reaching as high as five storeys in the north and south wings, surrounded by a low defensive wall and further comprises seven kivas (underground ceremonial chambers), four middens, a foot-race track and the San Geronimo Catholic Church.
Immediately east lie the ruins of the original pueblo, a sacred site referred to as ‘Cornfield Taos,’ laid down around 1325 AD but remains unknown why it was abandoned so soon. The original settlers were apparently Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans) driven away from the Four Corners(1) either through a long drought or a violent struggle.
Taos Pueblo quickly established itself as a trading hub between the natives along the Rio Grande and the Great Plains whilst it held a trade fair every fall following the harvest before the first Spaniards arrived in the form of conquistadores under the Francisco Vásquez de Coronado expedition, seeking the mythical Seven Cities of Gold, in 1540.
The attempts of Spanish Jesuits to impose the Catholic religion, raising the mission of the San Geronimo de Taos, despite the averse feelings of the natives along with the increased presence of new Spanish settlers in the early 1600s incurred friction that saw the resident priest killed and the church ruined by about 1660.
Yet, having been forced out of the entire region, the Spaniards gradually returned after twelve years under Diego de Vargas to regain the upper hand over the region by the end of the 1690s, with the mission re-established in Taos Pueblos for a third time.
The original pueblo had very few windows and no conventional doorways, apparently for defensive purposes, as access to rooms was gained through square holes in the roofs and the use of wooden ladders, with no interconnections between the houses.
The northern side (picture), apparently intended mainly towards defensive ends, is among the most photographed and painted structures in North America made of adobe walls that can be several feet thick.
The renowned Eastern Columbia Building, or otherwise Eastern Columbia Lofts, shapes a magnificent sample of Art Deco architecture and lies on South Broadway within the Broadway Theatre District and the Historic Core in Downtown Los Angeles, California.
The thirteen-storey edifice was designed by Claud Beelman and was completed within just nine months in September 1930 as the headquarters of the Eastern-Columbia Department Store, crowned by a decorative four-side clock tower to a total height of 80m (264ft).
It was built of steel-reinforced concrete and coated with glossy turquoise terracotta tiles trimmed with blue and gold that along with its prominent clock tower help stand out for miles whilst its façade is adorned with chevrons, zigzags, sunburst patterns and other motifs.
Among others, it has featured in films such as ‘Predator 2’ and ’12:01 PM” as well as the pilot episode of the eminent TV series ‘Moonlighting’ starring Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis
The Fisher Building, designated a national historic landmark in 1989, is an eye-catching 30-storey scyscraper located on West Grand Boulevard at the heart of the New Center in Detroit, Michigan.
The edifice was designed and built in Art Deco style by architect Albert Kahn, completed in 1928, on account of the Fisher family and was clad in various types of marble, granite and limestone while its hipped roof was originally laid with gold leaf tiles.
Traffic inside the building is served by a a good 21 elevators as it reaches 130m (428ft) high, a slightly higher 135m (444ft) with its antenna on top, while it accommodated three fine art galleries highlighted by the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in the 1960s through to the 1980s.
The original plan aimed for a complex of three towers with two 30-storey buildings standing either side of a central 60-storey tower but the Great Depression dictated a dramatic scale-down to a single tower in the end.
Finally, the Detroit landmark houses Fisher Theatre, among the cities oldest theatre venues, that was originally fashioned in the Mayan Revival style and could entertain roughly 3500 people but a substantial overhaul saw capacity tail off to about 2090 seats nowadays.
Among the most legendary gunfights to have ever taken place in the American Old West (or Wild West) is the fierce encounter between the Earp brothers joined by Doc Holiday and a group of armed Cowboys, a band of local outlaws, that took shape in Tombstone, Cochise County in southern Arizona, on 26 October 1881.
The incident was brief and lasted probably less than a minute, about 3pm in the afternoon, following growing tensions between the two sides and saw three of the Cowboys, brothers Tom and Frank McLaury along with Billy Clanton, fall dead at a narrow lot outside C.S. Fly’s photography studio a little further down O.K. Corral actually.
Virgil Earp, Deputy US and Town Marshall at the time, and his brother Morgan along with Holiday were all wounded, on the other side, but legendary Wyatt Earp came unscathed out the fight in an attempt to enforce an ordinance in place that disallowed the carrying of guns within the town.
The prelude to the whole affair was a heated argument between Holiday and an armed Ike Clanton, brother of fallen Billy, the previous night at the Alhambra Saloon before he was arrested by Virgil Earp in the morning and was dismissed on a fine by a judge.
Enraged, the latter sought out and incited the other five Cowboys, the above mentioned included, to move all together over to Fremont Street, spreading the word that they were armed and intended to remain so.
Sheriff John Behan, who largely favoured the Cowboys, arrested the Earps and Holiday on accounts of murder following allegations of Ike Clanton that they fired against unarmed men, yet a month-long hearing showed that at least two of the latter’s side were armed during the fight.
The feud between sides didn’t blow over, nevertheless, and Virgil Earp was shot in the back in an ambush two months later, three days after Christmas, where his brother Morgan was killed three months further on by a shot that was fired by a Cowboy from a dark alley close to Campbell & Hatch’s saloon.
Appointed as a new Deputy US Marshall, Wyatt Earp deputised Doc Holiday and a group of men that hunted down and killed several Cowboys by means of revenge in the wake of these events.
The whole affair grew into a legend out on the frontier but remained widely unknown until Stuart Lake’s best-seller biography titled “Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal” in 1931, two years after the latter’s death, that included a dramatic account of the shootout at the OK Corral in 1881.
Furthermore, the story further became a favourite theme in the genre of Western films lining up the likes of “My Darling Clementine” starring Henry Fonda (1946), “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas (1957) as well as “Tombstone” starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer (1993, picture) down the years.
The eye-catching Mark Twain House and Museum, built in 1874, lies on Farmington Avenue in Asylum Hill, immediately west of Downtown Hartford in the namesake county of central north Connecticut.
Renowned American author and humorist Mark Twain, or Samuel Langhorne Clemens as his real name was, lived here along with his family for a good 17 years between 1874 and 1891 in a mansion that was portrayed as “part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock” by his biographer Justin Kaplan.
It was designed by New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter in the American High Gothic style, featuring a trademark high-pitched roof, and as legend has intended to evoke the image of a riverboat, apparently out of Twain’s own past as a pilot on Mississippi River.
The towering edifice provided the setting where Twain wrote many of his best known works such as ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Prince and the Pauper” and “Life on the Mississippi” during the time he spent here.
Financial struggles saw the family move out to Europe in 1891, exacerbated by the Panic of 1893, so that Twain could lecture to earn money in order to cancel out his debts.
But the sad loss of his daughter Suzy, who stayed with her sister Jean behind, in August 1896 made a return to the house sentimentally impossible – even though Twain substantially recovered in financial terms – and saw the property sold in 1903.
The building later served as a school, a apartment building and a public library branch before it came under the wing of the Mark Twain Memorial group in 1929, saved from demolition courtesy of Katharine Seymour Day who went on to great pains to have it restored to much of its old grandeur by its century anniversary in 1974.
A substantial revamp carried out on mainly on the exterior and the surrounding grounds in 1999 saw the house return to the state it was back in its golden days of the 1880s.
Today, a noted museum, it contains about 50000 artefacts, historic photographs, manuscripts and furnishings as well as Tiffany glass while it has seen celebrity appearances by the likes of Stephen King, Judith Blume and John Grisham in its feature events.
The beautiful Ora Pelton House, built in 1889, is a historic and the only Victorian residence that remains on South State Street in what used to be an affluent quarter along Fox River in Elgin, Kane County in northeast Illinois.
Also known as the Izzo-Pelton House, it was designed and built by architect Gilbert M. Turnbull on account of physician and surgeon Dr. Ora A. Pelton.
It displays a rectangular shape and counts three storeys while it blends elements of both Queen Anne and Stick-Eastlake (or sometimes called Stick Victorian) style.
Only two familes, the Peltons and the Izzos, have occupied the residence since it came into shape, reflected in the alternate name thereof.
Breaking through History 