History Tuesday – J.M. Wayne Neff House

 

History Tuesday at Old Houses Under $50K is for informational purposes only – NOT for sale. We feature properties that cost less than $50K sometime in their history. Today, we feature J.M. Wayne Neff house of Cincinnati. which was built in 1882 by architect Bruce Price.

 

Neff was president of the Arctic Ice machine Company of Cincinnati. The Neff family often vacationed at Bar Harbor where Price also rented a summer cottage. It was here that Neff commissioned Price to build this home the earliest of eight houses that Price designed in his career.

 

 

Bruce Price

Career

Bruce Price (1845-1903) is known as the innovator in the Shingle Style. Born in Cumberland, Maryland, he attended Princeton University for a short time before interning for four years with a Baltimore architectural firm. Subsequent to partnering with a firm and touring Europe, Price opened his own practice in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  He moved to New York City in 1877 with the highlight of his career designing the planned community of Tuxedo Park.

Price’s daughter wrote in 1911:

“In beginning Tuxedo, the architect’s idea was to fit buildings with the surrounding woods, and the gate-lodge and keep were built of graystone with as much moss and lichen as possible. The shingled cottages were stained with the color of the woods—russets and grays and dull reds—ugly to the taste of a quarter century later, though this treatment did much to neutralize the newness of the buildings—Old World and tradition-haunted as it looks, it is new, incredibly new.”

Price invented, patented, and built the parlor bay-window cars for the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Boston and Albany Railroad.

 

Personal Life

In 1871, Price married Josephine Lee, the daughter of a Wilkes-Barre coal baron. The couple had two children. You may know Emily Price Post, the nnovelist and American authority on etiquette. Son William died in infancy. Price is buried, alongside his wife and son, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

 

Exterior

Compared to Price’s later designs at Tuxedo Park, the Neff house had a more complicated exterior and a more fluid interior.  The house was anchored by the tower flanked by two gables. The two-side veranda and two sleeping porches allowed the family both public exposure and some privacy in their suburban neighborhood.

 

 

 

 

Interior

Inside was a large hall  that functioned as the hub of the house. Those entering the front door were attracted to the heavily carved fireplace and mantel as well as the decorative panels in the ceiling. The stairway was also a work of art with multiple changes of directions.

Built for approximately $25,000, the Neff house stood at the corner of Reading Road Road and Oak Street until, sadly, it was demolished

Inside was a large hall  that functioned as the hub of the house. Those entering the front door were attracted to the heavily carved fireplace and mantel as well as the decorative panels in the ceiling. The stairway was also a work of art with multiple changes of directions.