Five Points
Vaught-Huff-Nicholson House
The story
Behind the sketch.
Charles N. Vaught had this exuberant late Victorian house built in 1900, when East Huntsville was emerging as the city's first modern streetcar suburb. Its irregular roofline, gables, upper balcony, curved porch, and decorative woodwork made it one of the neighborhood's earliest substantial residences. Some of the porch's original spindlework was later traded for more restrained Colonial Revival details, but the house never became particularly shy. The O. C. Huff family moved here in 1919. Their daughter Sarah Huff Fisk later became a Huntsville historian, artist, author, and preservation advocate, and her childhood memories offer a lively account of early Five Points. The street was still dirt, a streetcar stopped nearby, wash water came from a backyard well, and Sarah and her sister staged marionette shows for neighborhood children at five cents a ticket. Individually listed in the National Register in 1981, and later included in the Five Points Historic District, the house remains an especially ornate witness to the neighborhood's streetcar-suburb beginnings.
- Neighborhood
- Five Points
- Book location
- Page 100
