Waltham – Page 2 – Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

Waltham Museum (Old Waltham Police Station) (1892)

by Dan/August 27, 2009June 12, 2011/Public Buildings, Queen Anne, Waltham

In 1871, an old schoolhouse on Lexington Street was converted to become Waltham’s Police Station. A new station was built adjacent to the earlier structure in 1892 and remained in service as a police station for seventy-two years. Afterward, it housed other city offices, but is now home to the Waltham Museum. Founded in 1971 by Al Arena, the Museum was housed for a time in the 1871 James Baker House, but from 2005 to 2007, the old Police Station was renovated to become the Museum’s new home.

Gore Place (1806)

by Dan/July 22, 2009/Federal, Houses, Waltham

Christopher Gore, born in Boston, was a lawyer and Federalist politician, who served as Governor of Massachusetts (1808-1810) and a United States Senator (1813-1816). Earlier, Gore had spent eight years in Britain, initially as a commissioner to the Jay Treaty in 1796. It was during this time, in 1799, that his country mansion in Waltham, built in 1793, burned down. Gore and his wife, Rebecca Amory Payne, influenced by the estates they had seen in Europe, planed the construction of a new mansion after their return home in 1804. Called Gore Place, it was completed in 1805. Christopher Gore retired to his estate in 1816, but declining health led him to return to Boston in 1822, where he lived until his death in 1827. After Mrs. Gore’s death, the house was sold at auction. Other families lived there in the following years and in 1921 the house and grounds became home to a country club. The house was saved from demolition in 1935 by Gore Place Society and the restored mansion has since been open to the public.

Lyman Estate (1793)

by Dan/July 17, 2009September 17, 2016/Federal, Houses, Waltham

The Lyman Estate, formerly known as “The Vale,” is a country estate in Waltham, originally established in 1793 by Boston merchant Theodore Lyman. The Estate’s grand Federal-style mansion was completed in 1798 and was designed by the Salem architect, Samuel McIntire. The mansion remained in the Lyman family as a summer home for the next century-and-a-half. Lydia Lyman Paine, daughter of nineteenth century owner George Lyman, married Robert Treat Paine, who built Stonehurst on a neighboring estate. The Lyman family added an upper story to their house in 1882. The estate, now owned by Historic New England, is known for its greenhouses (the earliest of which dates to 1800), which are open to the public.

Stonehurst, the Robert Treat Paine Estate (1886)

by Dan/July 16, 2009December 30, 2012/Houses, Romanesque Revival, Second Empire, Shingle Style, Victorian Eclectic, Waltham

Stonehurst was the country house of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., a lawyer, housing reformer and great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Located in Waltham, the earliest part of the house was a Second Empire building, designed by Gridley James Fox Bryant and constructed in 1866 for Paine and his wife, Lydia Lyman Paine. This house was moved to a new site atop a ridge and a large addition in the Shingle style was designed by the architect H.H. Richardson. Begun in 1884, the project was almost complete when Richardson died in 1886. In collaboration with Richardson was the great landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted. The organic relationship of the completed house and the landscape is a notable feature of what is considered to be an architectural masterpiece. The estate was given to the City of Waltham and is open to the public.