83 Main Street

The house stands on a deep, narrow, wooded lot on the west side of Main Street. The single outbuilding is a garage.

• Record ID: 86
• Address: 83 Main Street
• Current Owner: Foss, Samuel A. and Marjorie
• Name of Building:
• Historic Name: Asahel Strong House
• Download PDF of Original Record

Notable Features

A flat, crown-moulded cornice with a dentil course is located above the panelled, central facade door. Two 6/3 sash vertical windows flank this doorway. The full-length, hip-roofed, facade porch is supported by simple stick columns which rise from a stick balustrade to square, moulded capitals. The full windows of the second story are 2/2
sash. A small 3.3 is in the gable, which in turn has slight cornice returns. A single story lean-to has been added to the west side of the house. A gabled pavilion is attached
to the southwest corner.

Historical or Architectural Importance

The Asahel Strong House, built ca. 1830, is a 2 story, 3 bay, nineteenth-century domestic vernacular building. Its wooden, post-and-beam frame rests on a mortared sandstone foundation and has an asbestos-covered gable-to-street roof, a central chimney and central hall, and an asbestos-sided exterior.
In 1826, Asahel Strong received the southern half of a ‘parsonage’ lot from the First Ecclesiastical Society under the terms of a nine-hundred and ninety-nine year lease.
The alienation of such parsonage lots is discussed in the entry for the Robinson-Andrews House, which stands immediately to the south of the Asahel Strong House. A mortgage deed, dated 1840, refers to a dwelling house on the north half of Strongls parsonage lot. The house remained in the Strong family until the 1850s. It has subsequently changed hands many times.
Asahel Strong was a prominent citizen of nineteenth-century Durham. He served often as a Justice of the Peace from 1823 to 1837. And from 1817 to 1832, he served five terms as a representative in the General Assembly.