File:Albion W. Tourgée House, Mayville, New York - 20220112.jpg

English: The Albion W. Tourgée House, 96 South Erie Street, Mayville, New York, January 2022. An absolutely magnificent Italian Villa-style mansion erected in 1881, the Tourgée House's design incorporates superlative examples of most of the style's defining features: a three-story central tower with double-windowed belvedere and a shallow-pitched, finial-topped pyramidal roof, half-width front porch that encloses and entrance topped by an unusual fanlight with elegant tracery, an octagonal projecting bay dominating the left side of the façade with quatrefoil designs above the windows, and - perhaps the most eye-catching element of the design - widely overhanging eaves undergirded by extremely prominent decorative brackets. A native of Ohio, Albion Winegar Tourgée (1838-1905) was among the most prominent jurists, politicians, writers, and civil rights activists of the period immediately after the American Civil War: after a dozen years spent in North Carolina during which he served as an influential Republican political figure and district court judge and earned the ire of the Ku Klux Klan, Tourgée's parallel success as a novelist (his bestsellers A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools and Bricks Without Straw, published in 1879 and 1880 respectively, were unusual in their chronicling of Reconstruction-era Southern life from the point of view of freed slaves and so-called "carpetbaggers" from the Northern states, such as Tourgée himself) enabled him to retire to Mayville in 1881, where he lived uneventfully at first. However, the culmination of his legacy was yet to come: in 1891, he came out of retirement to aid the New Orleans Citizens' Committee in their opposition to the new Louisiana state law segregating rail transportation in the state, and later served as the attorney representing Homer Plessy, the African-American man who unsuccessfully challenged that law in the famous Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Tourgée moved out of the house in 1900, when President William McKinley appointed him to a post at the U.S. consulate in Bordeaux, where he served until his death.