Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

The Daniel Colton House, on Longmeadow Green, was built in 1829 and is a gable-front/sidehall plan house, a layout which first appears in Longmeadow in the 1820s. To the left of the main entrance are various later additions and an older section, which originally housed the shop of Daniel Colton, who was a joiner.

Proceedings at the Dedication of the Town Hall, Wayland, December 24, 1878; with Brief Historical Sketches of Public Buildings and Libraries, Vol. 1, (1879), contains the following about the building of the Old Town Hall of Wayland:

In 1840, the common land on which the old meeting-house had stood having been sold in the mean time to Dea[con] James Draper, he proposed to erect a new building on a part of the same, for the use of the town, to contain a town-hall, a school-room, with anterooms, etc., for the sum of seventeen hundred dollars. His proposal was accepted, and the building was first occupied for town meetings Nov. 8, 1841. Subsequently the hall was used also for an academy, under Rev. L. P. Frost. The library occupied a part of the lower floor, and for this and other public uses it served the town until the erection of the new building in 1878.

The new building was located across the street. The Old Town Hall later served as a grocery store and today houses offices.

Sudbury’s original Greek Revival-style Town Hall, built in 1846, stood in Sudbury Center until it was destroyed by fire in 1930. A new building, following the same design but enlarged to plans by Charles H. Way, a Sudbury architect, was built in 1932. The Sudbury Historical Society is located on the Town Hall’s upper floor.

The house of Horatio Coomes at the south end of Longmeadow Green was built around 1831, although parts may have been built earlier, as there were buildings on the property when it was sold to Coomes in 1826. Coomes later built another home nearby and the sold the earlier house, which is now known as the Coomes-Almquist House. Many rooms were added to the expanding house over the years.

The facade of the 1846 Greek Revival style house at 112 Brattle Street in Cambridge faces Willard Street, while a columned porch faces Brattle. The house was constructed by the builder, S.D. Brown and in the early twentieth century was the home of Clifford H. Moore, a Harvard Professor of Latin who contributed to Harvard Studies in Classical Philology and translated the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus.

The Nathan Appleton House, at 39 Beacon Street, and its partner, the Daniel Parker House, at no. 40, were designed for the two former business partners by Alexander Parris, a noted Boston architect. Built in 1818, a fourth floor was added to both houses in 1888. These two bowfront row houses which are transitional between the Federal and Greek Revival styles, at one time mirrored each other more closely, but the Appleton house had an extra window added on each of its floors. Nathan Appleton was a pioneering textile manufacturer. The marriage of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to Appleton’s daughter, Fanny, took place in the house in 1843. From 1914 into the 1990s, the building housed the Women’s City Club of Boston. In more recent times, it has been subdivided into condominiums. There is a video of the house’s exterior on YouTube.

No. 77 Mount Vernon Street in Boston is part of a row of Greek Revival Houses constructed in 1836-1837 on the site of the former Bulfinch-designed mansion of Jonathan Mason. These buildings are set back 30 feet from the street, in line with other earlier houses in this block. It later nineteenth century, the house at no. 77 was the home of Sarah Wyman Whitman, an artist and graphic designer who created book bindings for Houghton Mifflin. Whitman’s work appeared on books by such authors as Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, Lafcadio Hearn and many others. In 1936, the house became the headquarters of the Club of Odd Volumes, a society of bibliophiles founded in 1887. The club had previously rented space in a large building across the street.