In 1811, the Bond family opened a store at the corner of Main and Central Streets in Boylston. When the store burned down in 1929 it was replaced by a new building, which today has the appearance of an American Foursquare house (1 Central Street) set above a modern storefront on its west side (700 Main Street). It was known as the Bond Corner Store, then the Boylston Center Store and is now the Boylston Deli.
Holyoke’s First Presbyterian Church was organized in 1886. The new church purchased the corner lot at Cabot and Chestnut Streets (237 Chestnut Street) from the Holyoke Water Power Company. Construction began in September, 1887, and the church was dedicated on March 5, 1889, although it had already been in use since August 1888. The church was built of granite with brownstone trim. It is now home to Centro de Restauracion Emanuel Inc.
Continue reading “First Presbyterian Church, Holyoke (1887)”
The cornerstone of the old Town Hall of Boylston was laid on August 21, 1830 and the building was completed later that year. Construction of the granite ashlar building was made possible by donations from Ward Nicholas Boylston, a prominent Boston merchant who appreciated that the town had been named for his family in 1786. The first floor of the Town Hall housed a school room, while the upper floor contained a hall for public meetings. The building is now the museum of the Boylston Historical Society.
The Queen Anne/Colonial Revival house at 60 Fairfield Street in Springfield was built in 1904 for Alfred White.
Early county courthouses in Worcester were built in 1733, 1751 and 1802. A granite courthouse with six columns, designed in the Greek Revival style by Ammi B. Young, was built between 1843 and 1845. An addition to the southwest corner of the building, designed in a Greek Revival/Victorian style by Stephen C. Earle, was made in 1878. In 1898-1899 a major expansion and remodeling of the building took place. The original courthouse portico was removed and a new facade created on Main Street which incorporated the original six columns and two new ones made to match the originals. The new facade, designed by Andrews, Jaques and Rantoul, features two pavilions (the one on the south is the original courthouse), with two columns each, flanking a central section with four columns. The Courthouse, located at 2 Main Street off Lincoln Square, is currently vacant.
The relatively early Queen Anne house at 47 Harvard Street in Worcester was designed by Stephen C. Earle. Its first resident was Benjamin Walker, a local ice merchant. With Stillman Sweester, Walker formed the company Walker & Sweester, which later became the Walker Coal and Ice Company. From 1881 into the twentieth century, the house was home to Walker’s daughter, Agnes, and her husband, Levis White. The house’s two-story porch and painted brick walls are later alterations.
For my 101st Salem post I present the Allen-Osgood-Huntington Triple House, located at 31-33-35 Chestnut Street in Salem. It was begun in 1828-1829 by Pickering Dodge and completed after 1833 by his son-in-law, John Fiske Allen, a horticulturalist who lived in No. 31. As described in Fisk Cousins and Phil M. Riley’s The Colonial Architecture of Salem (1919):
there, in 1853, for the first time in New England, [Allen] grew and brought to flower in his greenhouse the Victoria regia, the great water lily of the Amazon, from seed obtained of Caleb Cope, of Philadelphia. The following season Mr. Allen enlarged his greenhouse and tank and obtained more seed from England, including that of the Amaryllis, Nelumbium and other tropical species of lilies which thrived and formed a rare collection much admired by many visitors. Mr. Allen published the results of his observations on the Victoria regia in a beautiful folio volume, finely illustrated by W. Sharpe from specimens grown in Salem. . . . Previous to Mr. Allen’s occupancy the house was for a time the home of Nathaniel Silsbee, United States senator from 1826 to 1835.
The middle house (No. 33) had various owners, including Captain Charles M. Endicott of the ship Friendship. In a famous incident that occurred in 1831, the ship was captured by Malays off the coast of Sumatra and then retaken in a fierce battle. In 1864, the house was purchased by George P. Osgood, whose family remained there until the 1940s. The bay window on this middle house is a Victorian-era addition. The house at the western end (No. 35) was home to three mayors of Salem: Charles W. Upham (served 1852-1853), who wrote the classic work Salem Witchcraft (1867), Asahel Huntington (served 1853-1854) and his son, Arthur L. Huntington (served 1885).
