Day: June 8, 2008

Concord Town House (1851)

by Dan//Concord, Italianate, Public Buildings

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The Town of Concord’s first Town House, used for “town meetings and the county courts 1721-1794,” was located across the town green from the location of the current Town House. In the nineteenth century, the town would continue to share a building with the courts, until a fire destroyed the courthouse in 1849 and the town’s privilege to use it’s replacement was not renewed. A new structure was therefore built specifically for town use in the Italianate style, designed by the Boston architect Richard Bond, who also designed Boston’s Lewis Wharf and Salem’s City Hall. Called a “town house,” it contained not only a town hall, but originally also housed Concord’s first public library and school classrooms. Later, the building would be used for strictly municipal functions. An addition was added to the rear in 1879-80.

Second Harrison Gray Otis House (1802)

by Dan//Boston, Federal, Houses

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The only freestanding mansion on Boston’s Beacon Hill is the second of three houses designed by Charles Bulfinch for Harrison Gray Otis, a prominent businessman, lawyer and Federalist Party leader. Both Otis and Bulfinch were members of the Mount Vernon Proprietors, who purchased land on Beacon Hill for development. Bulfinch created an even more elegant mansion for Otis on Mount Vernon Street than the one he had created earlier, on Cambridge Street in 1796. Constructed between 1800 and 1802, Bulfinch hoped that the freestanding home on a landscaped property with outbuildings in back would be a model for the rest of Beacon Hill, but the neighborhood would end up being much more densely developed. Otis sold the house in 1806, only a few years after it was built: his growing family would require an even larger home, also to be designed by Bulfinch. Many people have owned the Second Harrison Gray Otis House over the years and undertaken various renovations and remodelings.

Hollis H. Hunnewell House (1869)

by Dan//Boston, Houses, Second Empire

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The Hollis H. Hunnewell House, on Dartmouth Street in Boston’s Back Bay, was built in 1869-1870. It was designed by Sturgis and Brigham for Hollis Horatio Hunnewell, son of Horatio Hollis Hunnewell, a wealthy financier, horticulturalist, and great benefactor of the town and college of Wellesley. Sturgis and Brigham designed the house with some of Boston’s earliest ceramic ornamentation on a building’s exterior. The mansard roofs atop the mansion’s irregularly sized towers, as well as a new one-story wing, were added to the building after a fire in 1881. In the early twentieth century, the house was owned by T. Jefferson Coolidge.

Benjamin Wadsworth House (1726)

by Dan//Cambridge, Colonial, Houses

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In 1726, a house was constructed on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, on the site where Harvard’s earliest building, the Peyntree House, had stood. It was first occupied by Harvard’s fourth president, Benjamin Wadsworth, his family and two slaves. After Wadsworth, it would serve as the home of eight other presidents, until 1849, when president Jared Sparks chose to reside in his own Cambridge home. During the Revolutionary War, the house was Washington’s first headquarters when he came to command the army during the siege of Boston in 1775. Do to its state of disrepair at the time, Washington soon moved to other quarters. Over the years, the house would serve as lodging for visiting ministers and student boarders (including Ralph Waldo Emerson). The building now houses the Office of the University Marshal and other offices. The Wadsworth House lost its front yard when Massachusetts Avenue was widened. Today it is the second oldest of Harvard’s surviving buildings, after Massachusetts Hall.