Neely Mansion

Sal is a voice that rides along as you drive Washington's roads: the road ahead, the pass, the stories of the places you pass.

Aaron Neely's daughter Lenore was born in 1879, and he and a few workmen built the house in 1894 [1]. His father David had brought the family west from Tennessee in 1853, crossing the Naches Pass to Porter's Prairie before settling in Kent [1]. The residence is Victorian, two stories of clapboard laid out on a square [1]. The front doorway holds the middle place among two windows, and each of the remaining three sides carries three windows, all with decorated surrounds and an entablature, with sawn scrollwork set below every lintel [1]. A decorative corbel table separates the floors, ground-level side porches run the length of the house, and a gable covers a second-floor balcony above the front porch [1]. Inside, the lower five feet of the walls are maple paneled, the rest white plaster, and light came from candles and oil chandeliers hung from the ceiling and raised or lowered by hand [1]. Neighbors who stayed overnight during shopping excursions danced from room to room through the opened lower doors to local fiddlers [1]. The Neely family held the property until the mid-1970s, and the all-volunteer Neely Mansion Association bought the building in 1984 [1].