Vernacular – Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

Mark Dewey Hat Shop (1816)

by Dan/April 6, 2020/Commercial, Greek Revival, Houses, Sheffield, Vernacular

On the grounds of the Sheffield Historical Society is a building, constructed about 1816, that once served as a hat and cap manufactory for Mark Dewey and his three apprentices. While conducting his business in the building, Dewey lived next door, in the Dan Raymond House, which is also owned by the Historical Society. He sold his hatter’s shop in 1828. In the 1980s, the building was restored by the Society to house the Mark Dewey Research Center, a collection of historical materials relating to Sheffield and surrounding towns. Continue reading “Mark Dewey Hat Shop (1816)”

Dr. Samuel Young House (1825)

by Dan/July 4, 2015/Harvard, Houses, Vernacular

The Young House, at 1 Fairbank Street in Harvard, was built in the early nineteenth century, although the exact date is unknown. In 1825, the property was sold by John P. Whitcomb to cordwainer William Lewis, who sold it to James Young in 1836. Young then transferred it to Dr. Samuel Young , who was probably his uncle. As described in the History of the Town of Harvard (1894), Vol. 2, by Henry Stedman Nourse, Dr. Young was

born in Athol August 12, 1782, son of Lt. Samuel and Lois (Sanderson) Young. Dr. Young was a graduate of Williams College, 1804, and practiced in Athol and Lowell before coming to Harvard. He lived for about thirty years in a house yet standing upon the east side of the common, where he died March 30, 1845. One of his legs being much shorter than the other, he walked with a cane. He was the last of the old-style doctors, paying his visits on horseback, his stock of medicines borne in saddlebags before him.

In the mid-nineteenth century the house was owned by his daughter Seraphina and her husband Hiram Joy and was called Joy Cottage. The house passed among female descendents until 1985.

Fruitlands Farmhouse (1825)

by Dan/February 28, 2015/Harvard, Houses, Vernacular

For seven months in 1843-1844, a farmhouse in the Town of Harvard served as the home of the Utopian agrarian commune called Fruitlands. Founded by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane and based on Transcendentalist principles, the experiment was not a success, failing due to the participants‘ inability to grow sufficient food. Alcott soon moved his family, including his daughter, the future author Louisa May Alcott, back to Concord, where he later purchased Orchard House to be the family home.

After the commune broke up, its land was bought by one of its former members, Joseph Palmer, who for 20 years used it as a refuge for reformers called Freelands. Clara Endicott Sears bought the property in 1910 and opened it as a museum in 1914. It is today part of the Fruitlands Museum. The farmhouse is described in its National Register of Historic Places nomination as typical of the late eighteenth-century. The Historic American Buildings Survey documentation describes it as an early 18th century farmhouse. The Fruitlands Museum website describes it as having been built in 1825.

Continue reading “Fruitlands Farmhouse (1825)”

Shaker Office, Fruitlands Museum (1794)

by Dan/December 16, 2014December 16, 2014/Harvard, Organizations, Vernacular

The Shaker community in Harvard began in the 1780s and flouished in the mid-nineteenth century. After the Harvard Shaker Village finally closed in 1917, the original Shaker Trustee’s Office, built in 1794, was moved in 1920 by Clara Endicott Sears to the Fruitlands Museum to become a Shaker Museum.

Judge Bailey Aldrich House (1930)

by Dan/December 16, 2014January 28, 2015/Harvard, Houses, Vernacular

The house at 89 Shaker Road in Harvard was built around 1930 on the site of one of the former dwellings of the Harvard Shaker Village. Judge Bailey Aldrich designed the house with the builder Harold Bigelow to reflect the Shaker tradition of simplicity.

South Maple Street School (1888)

by Dan/November 5, 2014/Schools, Vernacular, Westfield

The former South Maple Street School, a two-room brick schoolhouse built in 1888, is located at 89 South Maple Street in Westfield. The school was in continuous use until 1918 and was then unoccupied until 1931, when it became a Grange Hall for Westfield Grange #20. An entryway to the cellar kitchen was added to the building’s front facade around 1960.

Horse Barn, Hancock Shaker Village (1850)

by Dan/May 6, 2014May 6, 2014/Hancock, Outbuildings, Vernacular

At the Hancock Shaker Village is an original Horse Barn. It originally stood on a nearby lot owned by the Shakers. It was dismantled and reerected at its current location in 1850 by Matthew Criteden, a non-Shaker. The barn was known as Elder Louis’ barn because Elder Louis Basting kept teams of carriage horses in the barn. The slate roof probably dates to 1876, when a number of buildings at the village were re-roofed in slate.