Nine of the ten houses featured in this gallery are within about three blocks of each other, all on the same street. So, I have given 3rd Street its own small gallery.
Sterling is an old one-industry town which, once upon a time, had a patriarch.
Washington Dillon founded a steel works there in the 1850's, and over the next half-century both the steel works and the town of Sterling grew steadily, along with the Dillon family fortune. Workers in overalls are filing into the steel works as a small girl dressed in an expensive frock, and watched over by a uniformed nanny, plays with a ball in front of a Victorian mansion. The mansion is one in a line that commandingly set almost beside the steel works, just beyond a railway cut, so close that the little girl can hear the distant roaring of the furnaces. OK, that's just a romantic notion on my part, but you get the general idea. The steel works are still there, surprisingly, and still doing a booming business as far as I can tell.