H.P. Larsen-Newton E. Noyes Home

A leading builder and supplier of construction materials for Scandinavian communities throughout Sanpete county, Albert Johnson received his commission to build this home in 1897 by a man named H.P Larsen, who was an entrepreneur. Larsen was also a fellow Scandinavian immigrant, having been born in Horbelov on the Danish island Falster. H.P Larsen only lived in his new home for three years before he sold it to Newton Eugene Noyes, who was the President at the time of the Sanpete Stake Academy. Noyes had come from a teaching position in Salt Lake City at Latter-Day Saints University, in 1892, and needed a place to live.

The Larsen-Noyes home is a 1 ½ story single family residence built in a Victorian era style, which was common to homes at the turn of the century. It was built upon a foundation wall of rusticated stone with the major trim elements, such as sills, lintels and belt courses also being made of stone. The structure itself is made of brick and is irregularly shaped with four gabled wings and an octagonal tower at the northeast corner of the house. The roof is gabled but the home also features three porches with shet roofs, dormers with hip roofs and a segmental bell roof on the tower The home features wooden trim, including dentiled friezes on the tower and porches as well as paneled cornice facia on the extended, boxed cornices of the gables. Decorative muntins were also included within the upper saches of the second floor windows on the tower and north wing. Along the first floor, there are transom windows which feature colored art glass and all the windows of the door and window bays are rectangular. To top it all off, there is decorative brickwork all around the building on the tall chimneys, an ornamental finial on the tower, an inscription plaque of carved stone, an eyebrow window and a massing which serve to add texture and color to the architecture of the home.

Today, the home stands as a symbol of the importance of middle-class business and its contribution to the development of the small immigrant community of Ephraim. It gives visitors a glimpse into the value of entrepreneurship in the community, sparking values such as energy, enterprise and the material goods those men and women sought after.