The Patterson Hamer House is a historic house located at 405 West 5th Street in

Vermont Vermont () is a state in the northeast New England region of the United States. Vermont is bordered by the states of Massachusetts to the south, New Hampshire to the east, and New York to the west, and the Canadian province of Quebec to ...

Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...

. Local businessman Patterson Hamer had the house built for his family in 1872–73. The house is designed in the Second Empire style, which was inspired by French architecture and popular in the United States from the 1860s through the 1880s. A

mansard roof A mansard or mansard roof (also called a French roof or curb roof) is a four-sided gambrel-style hip roof characterised by two slopes on each of its sides, with the lower slope, punctured by dormer windows, at a steeper angle than the upper. The ...

with two projecting

dormer A dormer is a roofed structure, often containing a window, that projects vertically beyond the plane of a pitched roof. A dormer window (also called ''dormer'') is a form of roof window. Dormers are commonly used to increase the usable space ...

s, a key feature of Second Empire designs, tops the house; the roof has

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

s at the top and bottom and 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. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

s along its

eaves The eaves are the edges of the roof which overhang the face of a wall and, normally, project beyond the side of a building. The eaves form an overhang to throw water clear of the walls and may be highly decorated as part of an architectural styl ...

. The house also features three porches, all of them part of the original design, and arched windows. The property also includes a carriage house and a privy; both are designed to match the house, and the former has its own mansard roof. The house was added to the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

on November 7, 1996.

References

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Illinois Second Empire architecture in Illinois Houses completed in 1873 National Register of Historic Places in Fulton County, Illinois Vermont, Illinois {{FultonCountyIL-NRHP-stub