Built in 1795 to 1797 on College Hill, your Edward Dexter House presents five bays wide beneath a hip roof and square monitor. Up close you can read the language of its facade: five bays wide, the center bay framed by two-story pilasters and crowned with a small gable pediment. Your eye is drawn upward to the hip roof topped by that distinctive square monitor — a rooftop feature that gives this house its skyline presence.
Inside, the well-preserved interior once became a template for an early-20th-century museum space designed by the Rhode Island School of Design to hold a furniture collection donated by the house’s then-owner, Charles Pendleton. This is one of the few 18th-century houses left in the neighborhood. You might also picture its earlier life: originally at the corner of George and Prospect Streets, the house was sawed in half in 1860 and moved in sections to its present location, later documented in Historic American Buildings Survey materials as 72 Waterman Street.
It was recognized for its significance when it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Notice the pediment and monitor, then the streetscape spreading around it.