Enoch and Keziah Terhune House, 1858

406 North State Street

Enoch and Keziah Terhune House, 1858

This house shows the transition in architectural styles between the Greek Revival and the Italianate. In plan, massing, and square shape, the house resembles an "Italianate cube." Its central entry/center hall construction, engaged corner columns, wide architrave, and rectangular six-over-six windows (some still with original glass) all point, however, to a Greek Revival sensibility.

It was built by Enoch Terhune, whose wife Keziah purchased the property in 1858. Terhune was the son of pioneers from Seneca County, New York who had settled in Pittsfield Township in 1831 when Enoch was 14. He was educated in Washtenaw County and became a builder and contractor in Ann Arbor in 1842. In 1846 he branched out into agricultural implements and owned a "sash and blinds" factory on Detroit Street. The 1881 History of Washtenaw County states that Terhune was the first to bring planing machinery to Ann Arbor, "thereby calling down on his head the wrath of numerous workmen who thought this would spoil their business." After his first wife died in 1857, he married Keziah with whom he had one child. Terhune's grandfather, an ensign in the Revolutionary War, is buried in the tiny Terhune Cemetery in Terhune Park owned by the City of Ann Arbor and maintained by the Pittsfield Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

After the turn of the century the Terhune property passed into the hands of grocer Jay Herrick of Herrick and Bohnet. Mrs. Herrick was an active suffragist, as indicated by a program of the Ann Arbor Equal Suffrage Club from 1911 which lists a meeting at this house.

The house was converted into apartments in the 1950s.