Historic Kurtz-Van Sicklin House

253 West Main Street

The Historic Kurtz-Van Sicklin House (built 1899, remodeled 1902 and 1916) in Weiser, Idaho, United States, is a one-and-a-half-story frame structure, veneered with red brick below and shaped shingles above, on the southeast corner of Third and West Main Streets in Weiser. This complex house represents both an original structure by John Tourtellotte and several remodeling projects by Tourtellotte and Company and Tourtellotte and Hummel.

The first floor is approached from Main Street through a broad, angular wraparound porch that extends from a point near the northwest front corner across the front of the house and back down the east side. The porch itself is original, with an upper fascia strip, low brick walls, concrete sills, and an uncoursed stone foundation continuous with those of the body of the house. The woodwork of the porch enclosure, with its geometrically ornamented posts, is the product of a 1916 remodeling by the firm, and it contrasts with the Queen Anne character of the rest of the house. That character is established by the asymmetrical placement of shallow gabled outsets and roof dormers on all four elevations of the basically classical, hip- and-ridge-roofed main block. The front outset is deepest, square above with a beveled parlor bay below. The west bay amounts to a slightly outset gabled wall dormer above, opening onto a balcony with low, shingled walls surmounting a broader and deeper square first-floor bay. The slightly deeper east bay is beveled above, square and broader below. The entire upper story is covered with shaped shingles in two patterns with banding rows of square cuts. All gables have eave returns; the main front and side gables are fitted with triangular apex lights; elongated, stylized wooden keystones set into curious shingled lintels appear on the front, west side, and rear.

The entire upper story flares above the fascia strip separating the two levels. An unusual feature of the profile of the house is the elongation of the roof below the gable line over part of the front and all of the east elevation. This results in a short second-story wall on that corner and side, containing a series of short windows. The rear east side is also made irregular by a pair of casement windows recessed into the roof in a reverse dormer arrangement, but this feature does not appear in the Tourtellotte and Company plans and is probably an alteration. The roofline at the southwest corner is hipped back to the gable line around the two- story porch addition designed by the firm in 1902. A small hip-roofed brick garage with a gabled front-facing dormer is at the right rear, facing Third Street. It was designed for two small vehicles and retains its pairs of cross-braced, six-light wooden doors. The designer of this ancillary structure is unknown. SIGNIFICANCE:

The Kurtz-Van Sicklin House is architecturally significant as a Tourtellotte Queen Anne house with several overlays from later remodelings by the firm. It represents several periods of stylistic development. The strange asymmetrical profile, achieved by elongation of the roof over the entire east elevation, is an irreverent device worthy of the imaginative Tourtellotte in his Queen Anne phase, and the shaped shingles and elongated wooden keystones in the dormer are typical. The 1902 remodeling, which enlarged the house by means of two-story porches to the rear, did little stylistically except to further irregularize the profile. But the cross- facade porch with its geometric capitals is related to those on the big bungaloid productions of the 1910s, such as the Sidenfaden house (site 77).

Mrs. W.B. Kurtz, the original owner, sold the house to E.A. Van Sicklin in 1901. Van Sicklin was a sheep raiser who served as Mayor of Weiser from 1903 to 1905 and in the Idaho Senate in 1907 and 1908.

From Idaho State Historical Society