The Clark R. Griggs House is a historic house located at 505 W. Main St. in Urbana,

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. It borders on Lake Michigan to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash River, Wabash and Ohio River, Ohio rivers to its ...

. The house was built in 1871 by

Clark Robinson Griggs Clark Robinson Griggs (March 6, 1824 – December 7, 1915) was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives and mayor of Urbana, Illinois. Griggs previously served two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives before moving to Cha ...

; Griggs was a railroad developer who served as Urbana's mayor and was a key figure in establishing the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

in the city. Griggs never lived in the house he built, and his son occupied the house after Griggs moved east. The

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century It ...

house is one of the few examples of the style in Urbana. The house's

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative Moulding (decorative), moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, ar ...

is decorated with paired

bracket A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their n ...

s, as is a projecting

bay A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, a lake, or another bay. A large bay is usually called a ''gulf'', ''sea'', ''sound'', or ''bight''. A ''cove'' is a small, ci ...

on the east side. The front porch has a

balustrade A baluster () is an upright support, often a vertical moulded shaft, square, or lathe-turned form found in stairways, parapets, and other architectural features. In furniture construction it is known as a spindle. Common materials used in its ...

and is supported by bracketed columns. The house was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

on November 30, 1978.

References

External links

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois Italianate architecture in Illinois Houses completed in 1871 Houses in Champaign County, Illinois Buildings and structures in Urbana, Illinois National Register of Historic Places in Champaign County, Illinois {{ChampaignCountyIL-NRHP-stub