Campbell-Whittlesey House - Rocheser, NY
Posted by: 
sagefemme
N 43° 09.065 W 077° 36.750
18T E 287577 N 4780905
This building at 138 Troup Street, Rochester, NY 14608, is simultaneously a NRHP listing and a contributing building in the Third Ward Historic District. It was a house museum when owned by the Landmark Society, but it is now in private ownership.
Waymark Code: WMDJGE
Location: New York, United States
Date Posted: 01/20/2012
Views: 4
The write-up for the Third Ward Historical District, summarizes this building thus:
"Another miller, Benjamin Campbell, rivalled his neighbor Ely with another elegant Greek Revival house at 123 Fitzhugh Street (the Campbell-Whittlesey House). Hamlin notes this house is "Lafever-like in spirit" with details matching almost line for line designs in Lafever's The Beauties of Modern Architecture (1835), published just after the accepted date for the construction of the house." (
visit link)
Sadly, the individual nomination form offers little additional detail. It only briefly describes the architecture as brick Greek Revivial with brick bearing walls and full attic in the four bay two-story main block, with gabled roof over the main block and the single story extension on the south end. The porch is a two-story pedimented Ionic portico with four columns and a ten-light rectangular window in the pediment, wooden cornice and frieze with grilles in the frieze. We are told that it was long a center of social and cultural life of early Rochester, but no examples are given.
It repeats the information about Minard Lafever, adding that he was born in the Finger Lakes region, trained as a carpenter, and as a writer, he exerted great invlence on designers of his time.
We learn little new about Benjamin Campbell, other than that the house passed from the Campbell family to that of Frederick Whittlesey, a prominent lawyer, in 1852, and that it was acquired by the Landmark Society of Western New York in 1937.
The Landmark Society, in turn, restored the interior "with particular attention to original paint colors and furnished rooms with furniture representative of the Greek Revival period in the Genesee Valley and Rochester." (
visit link)
The house then became an admission charging museum, with only 100 years seperating its origins from its viewers. In 1953 land was appropriated by the State of New York for highway widening purposes (in fact, I couldn't get a good picture of the north facade from the south side of the Inner Loop, as I couldn't get far enough away to capture the whole thing). In 1965 the Landmark Society acquired an adjacent lot facing S Fitzhugh Street for parking. Since then, the Landmark Society has acquired the Hoyt-Potter building to the south of both the Campbell-Whittlesey House and the parking lot.
The nomination form describes its current use as a museum, and the museum sign still stands in front of the the Campbell-Whittlesey House, but it is no longer a museum. A local doctor has purchased the house, and is performing renovations, according to staff at the Landmark Society.