This is one of the more elaborate of the many Valley houses designed by a Philadelphia firm that also constructed hotels and commercial buildings in Virginia in the early 1890s. They worked mostly for land development companies, several of them in the Valley, as well as for others in Pennsylvania and Alabama. This Queen Anne house was built for Edward Echols, Virginia's lieutenant governor from 1898 to 1902. Constructed of brick, stone, and half-timbering, the house has stacked gables, porches, balconies, and a projecting turret crowned with an owl finial whose eyes were lit by gas. A. A. Farnham designed the house's northeast garden in 1934.
