Sharpstein Manor: who built it, and how it got its name

Sharpstein Manor is the Queen Anne Victorian at 208 South Palouse Street in Walla Walla, Washington: a round corner tower, a loggia of oval windows, and a long wing wrapped in two storeys of fretwork verandas. Despite the name, no Sharpstein built it, and it was not called Sharpstein Manor until 1984. Here is who did build it, how it got its name, and a 3D model of it to turn round.

Where

208 S. Palouse St., Walla Walla, Washington

Built

About 1893

Built for

Charles B. Upton, attorney

Called Sharpstein Manor

Since 1984

Today

A home and nine apartments

On the map

Stop 6, Historic Homes Trail

Built for a lawyer named Upton

On 8 December 1892 Charles B. Upton, a Walla Walla attorney, paid Michael and Amelia Ward $2,200 for a plot on the west side of Palouse Street, between Poplar and Birch. The city’s 1889 panoramic view shows nothing on the site, and the 1892 directory gives Upton no address; the 1893–94 directory has him living there. So the house was probably built in 1893. No architect is recorded.

Upton practised as Upton & Upton with his younger brother, William H. Upton, a Superior Court judge from 1889 to 1897. Charles had died by 1910, and that April his widow, Addie, sold the house to Ida Cowan for $13,500. The Cowans lived there until the 1920s.

There was one Sharpstein in the land’s story before that, though not in the house’s. The plot had been sold at a sheriff’s auction in 1873, after a court case brought by the lawyer Benjamin L. Sharpstein, and the buyer was Amelia Ward.

From family house to apartments

After the Cowans the house changed hands several times in a few years. In 1926 a widow, Catherine Garn, bought it for $26,500 and let furnished rooms; by 1931 it was the Marshall Apartments, with seventeen units. A Sharpstein moved in in 1935: Minnie Sharpstein, Frank Sharpstein’s widow, rented apartment 16.

On 15 October 1937 Annabel Sharpstein, the widow of John Sharpstein, bought the building and lived in apartment 1. Under her it was the Palouse Apartments, with twelve units. She sold it in 1948 for $28,500 to Clarence R. Rogers, the principal of Sharpstein School, who also lived in the building. It stayed the Palouse Apartments until 1984, when it was renamed Sharpstein Manor. The records do not say why that name was chosen, but Annabel Sharpstein’s eleven years as owner are the obvious link.

Turn it round here

Interactive 3D model

Sharpstein Manor

The model is built from photographs of the house: the tower and its bell-shaped cap, the oval windows of the loggia, the pedimented entrance porch and the wing’s two storeys of verandas.

Open the 3D model →Download it for Minecraft

The house

Sharpstein Manor is a Queen Anne house, the style of the American 1880s and 90s that loved towers, porches and as many kinds of decoration as a single front could carry. From the street:

• The corner tower is round, with a bell-shaped cap, and stands at the corner of the main house beside the wing.
• The loggia is an open corner porch on the upper floor, its walls cut with a row of oval openings, above the entrance porch.
• The entrance porch has columns and a pediment over double doors.
• The front gable has fretwork bargeboards, patterned shingles and red-brick chimneys.
• The wing on the left, as you face the house, has two full-width verandas stacked one on the other, with fretwork brackets and spindle railings.

When the wing was added is not settled. Visit Walla Walla’s trail guide says 1938, the year after Annabel Sharpstein bought the house; a local newspaper account puts it after a fire around 1915–17. That the building was already seventeen apartments by 1931 suggests the earlier date.

In 2001 the preservation group Walla Walla 2020 gave the house a certificate of merit for its “Painted Lady” paintwork. Inside, the 2026 sale listing describes a carved wooden staircase, stained glass, decorative columns, arched doorways and detailed ceilings.

Which Sharpstein?

The Sharpstein name is everywhere in Walla Walla because of Benjamin L. Sharpstein, a lawyer who came to the town in 1865, was elected three times to the territorial legislature and was a delegate to the convention that wrote Washington’s state constitution in 1889. Sharpstein Elementary School, opened in 1898 and described by the state legislature as the oldest continuously operating elementary school building in Washington, is named after him. His son John L. Sharpstein was the first president of the Walla Walla Public Library’s board, and the library’s 1905 Carnegie building, now the Carnegie Art Center, stands a block north of the Manor.

The Manor’s own Sharpstein, Annabel, was the widow of a John Sharpstein. The sources do not establish whether he was Benjamin’s son, so it is safest not to assume so. Two other Sharpstein buildings are easy to confuse with this one: the Sharpstein Apartments at 221 Fulton Street, which Annabel also owned in the 1950s, and the house Frank B. Sharpstein built in 1904 at 404 South Palouse Street, two blocks south.

Seeing Sharpstein Manor

The house is private: a home and apartments let to long-term tenants, not a museum, venue or bed and breakfast. It is best seen from the street as stop 6 on Visit Walla Walla’s Historic Homes Trail, which also takes in the Carnegie Art Center to the north and the 1896 Rees Mansion across Birch Street. The trail guide says it is decorated at Christmas with “multitudes of lights and figures”.

At the time of writing, in October 2026, the house is for sale: it was listed in August 2026 as a main residence and nine one-bedroom apartments, at $1.5 million.

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