Orford Ridge Street row of mansions
— — seven white houses, one long street, two hundred years.
Not only on a wall.
“Seven Federal-period houses sit in a row along Main Street in Orford, on a low ridge above the Connecticut River. Built between 1773 and 1839 by prosperous merchants and millers, they share white clapboard, formal porticos, and a careful relationship to one another that has not been broken in two centuries. Washington Irving is said to have called the row the most beautiful village street he had ever seen. The houses are still private homes. The view from the road is the view.
Orford Ridge Street row of mansions, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Ridge Houses sit on a low rise on the east side of Main Street in Orford, New Hampshire, a small town on the Connecticut River about twenty miles north of Hanover. The seven houses were built between 1773 and 1839, most by merchants enriched by the river trade and by early manufacturing along Jacobs Brook. The streetscape was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974 as the Orford Street Historic District. The houses face west across the river to Fairlee, Vermont, and the Green Mountains behind it.
All seven houses are wood-frame on stone foundations, clapboarded white, with formal central entries and either Federal-period fanlights or later Greek Revival porticos. The Wheeler House, built in 1814 for inventor Samuel Morey, is the most photographed; Morey ran an early steamboat on the Connecticut here in 1793, fourteen years before Robert Fulton. The Dana, Howard, and Wilcox houses share similar plans drawn from pattern books by Asher Benjamin and built by Hanover housewrights. The 1839 Sawyer House at the south end closes the row in a slightly later Greek Revival mode.
The Ridge is a public street, New Hampshire Route 10, with no entrance fee and no formal tour. The houses themselves are private residences and not open to visitors. The view is from the sidewalk along the west side of Main Street, looking east across the lawn rise to the houses. Late afternoon light from the river side brings out the symmetry of the porticos. October is busy; June is quiet. The Orford Historical Society maintains a small museum near the south end and publishes a self-guided walking pamphlet.