Blaine House

George Washington Blaine, born in England in 1854, emigrated to America later in the century, and worked at sheep ranching for a time, as a pioneer settler along the banks of the Cheyenne River. After wedding in Iowa, he and his bride traveled back to Wyoming in a covered wagon and into the tent town called Antelope, in the early to middle 1880’s. Built near the turn of the century, the Blaine House served as the family home in Douglas until at least 1955, when Blaine’s wife, Mary, affectionately known in Douglas as “Grandma Blaine,” died at the age of 96. Hers is the oldest house on the tour, and the second-oldest house in the North Douglas Historic District. At the time of its construction, the local press heralded the Blaine House, with its nine rooms and running hot water, as “the best and most expensive building in town.” Blaine’s, then, was one of the earliest substantial homes to be constructed beside the dirt streets along which Douglas was expanding, block by block—and was sited within an area that the press referred to as “Aristocracy Hill,” a precursor, perhaps, to what became “mansion row” along North 6th Street. The architecture of the house exhibits details of the “Classical Revival” style, as evidenced by the central pediments crowning the roofs at the front, the tapered columns set atop rectangular wood bases, which support the porch roof— and, above all, in the perfect symmetry of the main facade. While the flat at the apex of the hipped roof may once have borne an iron railing, and thus constituted a traditional “widow’s walk,” apart from that and the refurbished siding, the exterior of the house appears now much as it did at the time of its construction, over a century ago.