March 25, 2012 – Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

Daniel Bray House (1776)

by Dan/March 25, 2012/Colonial, Houses, Salem

The house at 1 Brown Street in Salem, which has been vacant for several years and has an unsafe building mark on its door, was built in 1776 for Daniel Bray. A master mariner who sailed as ship’s master on several vessels owned by merchant John Derby, Bray built the house on land owned by his family, which he later purchased in 1770. After retiring from the sea, Bray managed Derby Wharf in Salem. The house remained in Bray’s family after his death in 1798 until 1856 and was then owned by the Kelley family until 1901. It was probably around 1902 that the front of the house was converted for shop space, serving first as a grocery store and then, at different times, as gift shops or for offices. Since 1983, it has been owned and rented out by the Peabody Essex Museum, which is currently investigating the architectural history of the house and will determine how best to use the structure in the future.

Trinity Church, Waltham (1870)

by Dan/March 25, 2012/Churches, Italianate, Waltham

In the early nineteenth century, the First Parish Church in Waltham became a Unitarian church. The Second Religious Society of Waltham was established in 1820. Its meeting house was called the “Factory Church” because its membership was primarily made up of people connected with the Boston Manufacturing Company, which provided the funds for the building. This Society also leaned towards Unitarian views (it later united with the First Parish in 1839) and those with Trinitarian beliefs left to form the Trinitarian Congregational Church. The congregation erected a church building on the corner of Main and Heard Streets in 1826. The current church building, at 726 Main Street, was built in 1870. The organization of the church was changed in 1906, when it incorporated itself as the First Congregational Church of Waltham. It became a member of the United Church of Christ in 1957, but withdrew in 2006 to become an independent, trans-denominational congregation called Trinity Church.