Description of Historic Place

Richard Smith House is a two-storey wood-frame dwelling located at 91 Smith Avenue in Truro, NS in a residential neighborhood in the west end of the town. It is of the centre-plan Italianate style, and features a prominent front porch with classical pillars, and drip mouldings over narrow sashed windows. The designation includes the building and surrounding property.

Heritage Value

Historical Value

Richard Smith House is valued for its historical association with the John Smith family. Smith, a blacksmith who settled in Truro around 1776, owned extensive lands in this area of the town. The area still preserves the historic street plan that developed as his farm was partitioned among his children and grandchildren, and subsequently subdivided into house lots for sale to the broader public.

Great-grandson Richard Smith, a farmer, received this property from his father Daniel Smith and built the present house on the site in 1866.

Architectural Value

Richard Smith House is valued as an excellent example of the centre-plan Italianate style, and features a number of elements taken from the contemporaneous Gothic and Greek Revival styles. The house is notable for the austerity and restraint of its design, characteristics that are not always present in houses of this style and massing.

Source: Planning Department, Town of Truro, file 10MNS0031

Character-Defining Elements

External elements that define the building’s heritage character consist of:

- building elements, including: basic Italianate form and massing, with a projecting central bay; two storey rear extension; wide eaves and cornices, and heavy brackets in the bay pediment; external and internal chimneys; unenclosed entry porch supported by classical columns and pilasters, with a low railing on the upper porch roof forming an uncovered balcony;
- window and door elements, including: narrow double-sashed windows with wide mouldings; pair of narrow square windows in the centre bay; pair of “piano windows” on either side of the external chimney; Gothic Revival drip mouldings above the windows and doors on the front and sides of the house
- building materials, including: wooden clapboard and trim; asphalt-shingled roof.

Elements that define the site’s heritage character include:

- placement of the house relative to the street and its neighbours;
- mature trees along the eastern boundary.