Appleton Hall, on the campus of Amherst College, was built in 1855 as Appleton Cabinet to house the college’s growing natural history collection, which was expanding beyond the the space provided by the 1847 Octagon. In 1925, the building was renamed Appleton Hall and remodeled as an academic building with lecture halls and offices. In 1999, Appleton Hall was converted into a first-year dormitory.
Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) and her husband, astronomer David Peck Todd, erected the house at 90 Spring Street in Amherst, the first Queen Anne-style house in town, in 1886-1887. The house was built on land the Todds acquired from Austin Dickinson, brother of the poet Emily Dickinson. Mabel Loomis Todd, who had an affair with Austin Dickinson, is remembered for her editing of posthumously published poems by Emily Dickinson. The first volume of Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was published in 1890. Later, there was a legal battle over property owned by Austin Dickinson and given to the Todds by his sister Lavinia. In 1898, the Todds sold the house and moved to another home in Amherst. That same year, Senator George B. Churchill came to teach rhetoric at Amherst College. He moved the Todd House from its original location to the other side of Spring Street and in 1907 built on the site his own house, called “The Dell” (a name that had also been given to the Todd House).
The c. 1865 house of Salem merchant Joseph H. Hanson is architecturally interesting because it takes the classic form of the earlier Federal-style houses (that Salem is so famous for) and updates it in the Italianate manner, which was popular in the mid-nineteenth century. The house can be found at 355 Essex Street in Salem.
William Brown, printer and clerk at the State House in Boston, lived in the Gothic Revival cottage erected in 1847 at 19 Broad Street in Salem. It was built on land acquired from the Pickering family and the Pickering House, a seventeenth-century house that was itself later altered in the Gothic style, is nearby. The Brown Cottage was owned by the Bartlett family from 1865 to 1919.
The Benjamin Blanchard House is at 134 Federal Street and 2 Carpenter Street in Salem. Built c. 1800, it has interior woodwork carved by Samuel McIntire, moved from the demolished Enoch Dow House by architect Philip Horton Smith, who owned the Blanchard House at the time.
At 13 Chestnut Street (corner of Cambridge Street) in Salem is a Greek Revival house built around 1832 by carpenter William Lummus for Miss Elizabeth King. From 1884 to 1923, it was the home of Dr. Thomas Kittredge, surgeon general of the Commonwealth. The bay window above the front door is a later addition.
The Greek Revival house at 330 Essex Street in Salem was built in 1845-1846 for hatmaker Jonathan Holman. In 1863, the house passed from Holman’s estate to Richard Price, an executive in a Boston ice company.
