Paris, Idaho - Architectural Treasures

In 1978, the Idaho Historical Society cataloged over 80 architecturally significant historic houses and commercial buildings in Paris, Idaho.  In this and future columns we will highlight one or two. The Paris Museum has information about this and other homes. 

36 SITE NAME: William L. Rich house       SITE 20

34 West Second South, Paris, Idaho

Photo by Bobbie Bicknell Coray

The former Rich house built in 1885, is a two-story frame structure with a rather low hipped roof and a square plan elaborated by a one-story hipped kitchen ell to the rear.   The main block is three evenly-spaced bays wide, and one broad and two narrow bays deep.  The siding is wide shiplap.  Door and window heads are molded.  Broad wooden “quoins”   short alternating with long in imitation of stones set sideways and lengthway into masonry corners, frame all elevations. Windows are two-over-two sash; the main entrance at left front has an oval transom.  There are three interior chimneys, two to the right and one to the left, all of corbelled brick.

A hip-roofed porch supported on blocky posts now crosses the facade; it was built in the early 1920s.  According to the present owner and long-time occupant, the original porch was small, spanning only the entrance bay and creating balcony space onto which the left front upstairs door opened.

The William Rich house is architecturally significant as the sole example in Paris of the Western Colonial or "classical box" residential style.  Standing, as it  formerly did, next to the cluster of adobe hall-and-parlor cabins in which all the Rich children were raised, this house is visible reminder of the passing of an architectural and cultural time in Paris.  

As one of only five full two-story residences in town, it can be seen as an attempt, in frame, to produce an image of substantiality and stature encouraged by Mormon culture and usually associated with structures built of brick or stone.  The adoption of the classicizing and stone-allusive quoins, the low, solid hipped roof, the taut row of upper windows butting into the shadow of the eaves, convey a desire for a particularly formalized stylishness, vaguely uncomfortable but visually striking in the broad spaces of Paris. 

Although the classical box can be found in the Plains, a tall farmhouse amidst open land, the upright William Rich house looks, among its small, more homey neighbors, to need a more densely populated streetscape. Its owner left Paris in 1886, just after the construction of the house, to become bishop in nearby larger Montpelier. He returned in 1893 as president of the Bear Lake Stake. It was said of Rich that he was "a lover of good books and theaters" and that he "believed in progress” . (Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Bear Lake) Pioneers, p. 682.