The Stephen Thurlow house is the richest and most lavish of the River Street houses, a Gothic Revival palace built of local Campbell's Ledge sandstone, with robust massing and a compact array of muscular bays. Compared with Withers's earlier 1863 romantic alterations to the Andrew T. McClintock house (now McClintock Hall; 44 S. River Street), it shows Wilkes-Barre embracing the swaggering and bombastic architecture of the High Victorian era in the wake of the Civil War. The house was later owned by dime-store magnate F. M. Kirby.