Here we find two remarkably different approaches to the brick-base, shingled-upper story Queen Anne formula. The earlier Clark House (40 Stimson Avenue) has relatively simple and unified articulation (a prominent end-gable roof, for example, echoed at a smaller scale in the entrance porch). Edward I. Nickerson’s Sprague House has a somewhat jumbled quality to the massing, while the detail seems to have come from a variety of the thousands of architectural books in Nickerson’s extensive library. Like the Potter House, this house illustrates Nickerson’s problem in the 1890s of reckoning with changing tastes, which were moving away from the excesses of the previous decade’s massing and detailing.
– 2003 Guide to Providence Architecture
The picture shows 36, 40 and 44 Stimson Avenue, from left to right.
You missed my house which was built by Nickerson in 1875 . The William Crins house at 24 Linden Street. Crins was president of Gorham silver at the time.. This was one of his first commissions when he went out on his own .