Information from the 1979 book: “Wayne County: The Aesthetic Heritage of a Rural Area” by Stephen W. Jacobs with Photographs by David Plowden. Permission courtesy of the Wayne County Historical Society.

Collier Cobblestone, Alton

     The Ridge Road is rich in cobblestone buildings, including churches as well as houses.  This substantial village residence retains the form and fashionable details of houses built a generation before.  Only the extended eaves and narrow chimneys suggest mid-nineteenth-century taste.  Although the limestone quoins are somewhat irregularly cut, so that from three to five courses of flinty cobbles can be laid up alongside them, the small paned twelve-over-eight windows of the upper story are unchanged today and add much to the regularly textured effect intended by the builders.   The delicate doorway is like a carved mirror frame of 1820.  Domed and fluted oval medallions are set into its architrave blocks, and tiny acorns fringe its shaped cornice.  Over the door is set a square marble block neatly incised with the name of the first owner, J. Collier, and 1840, the date of construction.

According to Evelyn (Tack) DeBadt, as a child growing up in Alton, she was told that this house was used as a station on the underground railroad.