Rome House
LA 1 at Delany Ln., Smoke Bend, LAThe Rome House is locally significant in the area of architecture because it is easily the most significant historic building in the community of Smoke Bend. It achieves this distinction because of its Greek Revival-Italianate styling and its overall intactness.
Smoke Bend, or "Faubourg la Boucanne" as it is called on an 1850 map, retains about fifty buildings that are over fifty years old. These buildings range in date from c.1870 through the 1930s and almost all of them are very plain and/or very badly altered. With the exception of the Rome House, the only styled buildings one finds are generic bungalows and an occasional bit of Eastlake trim on an otherwise plain cottage or shotgun. There are about a half dozen other cottages of the same basic type and roughly the same period as the Rome House, but they are all in a very poor state of preservation (asbestos siding, modern wrought iron columns, lowered porch floors, etc.). Against this backdrop, the Rome House is clearly the landmark of the community. It is the only intact example of the Greek Revival-Italianate taste. (The other cottages have lost their distinguishing stylistic features such as columns, balustrades, etc.). Although the capitals and balustrades on the Rome House are replacements, they duplicate the originals, and the house today looks very much as it did when it was built.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1990.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.