301 S Main St

From the National Register nomination

Greek Revival/Italianate/Classical Revival two-story frame house of painted stretcher-bond brick with façade piers and an asphalt-shingled hip roof. The roof has bracketed hipped dormers with double round-arch windows. Above the roof project interior side brick chimneys with narrow paneled stacks. Under the roof runs a bracketed cornice with dentils and sawn pendant ornament under bracket pairs. The front windows are paired 1/1 with Greek Revival lintels with center tablets with guilloche carving and pendant side tablets with faceted faces. The one-story front porch has fluted Ionic columns, a dentil cornice, and turned balusters. After 1960 the porch was extended to wrap around the south elevation. This section, which may incorporate a pre-existing south-side porch, has an enclosure with novelty weatherboard siding and a cinder block foundation. A historic photo shows the original front porch, a one-story entry portico on fluted Ionic columns with a decorative metal roof balustrade (perhaps some of the columns were reused in the present porch). The front entry has a transom and sidelights with gridded muntins, a symmetrically molded surround with console brackets ornamented with volute and foliar carving, and a two-panel door. On the north side is a one-story brick wing that may be reduced from an addition made on this side ca. 1905. To the rear is a two-story brick ell and one-story frame additions with weatherboard and vinyl siding. According to research by Maureen Perlman, the house was built in 1856 for E. T. H. (Edwin Tulin Harrison) Warren and his newlywed wife Virginia Magruder Warren. The house was built by Warren's uncle, builder William Rice, and there is a tradition that it was a wedding gift for the couple (the Warrens married in December 1855). The front entry console brackets suggest pattern book influence. There is also a tradition that the Warrens lived at Frascati in Orange County at first and only moved to Harrisonburg during the Civil War. Warren, a lawyer by trade, helped form a local militia company and he fought in a number of battles during the Civil War. He was killed at the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. Virginia Warren died in 1891. Deed records suggest the Warrens sold the house to E. T. H.'s mother Harriet Warren and grandmother Milly Rice before 1864. The house was sold out of the family in 1873 and in 1894 it was purchased by George Sipe, who served in the General Assembly. Sipe made improvements to the house and died there in 1939. Most of Sipe's alterations were made between 1902 and 1907, as indicated by Sanborn maps. The city acquired the house in 1956 and housed the Recreation Department in it. Dances, classes, and after-school programs were held here. The Rockingham-Harrisonburg Historical Society was headquartered here in the late 1970s and 1980s. In 2000 the city gave the property to the Virginia Quilt Museum, and since then architectural assessments and plans have been completed by Richard Bierce and Bill Frazier. (Joan Knight; Perlman, "Warrens Among First Harrisonburg Settlers;" Caldwell, Terrell, and Zapton, "George Sipe House;" Daily News-Record, June 14, 1978)