Victorian Eclectic – Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

The Wayside (1717)

by Dan/August 6, 2020August 6, 2020/Colonial, Concord, Houses, Victorian Eclectic

The Wayside in Concord (not to be confused with Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury) is a historic home (now part of Minute Man National Historic Park) that was the residence of several famous authors over the years. The oldest part of the house may date to as early as 1717. Minuteman Samuel Whitney, who owned two slaves, lived in the house at time of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. The first of the authors to live in the house was Louisa May Alcott, whose parents, Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott, owned it from 1845 to 1852. They named their home “Hillside” and made additions to the original saltbox structure (see image below). Many of Louisa’s experiences in the house were later incorporated in her famous book Little Women. The family would eventually move to Boston, but later in the 1850s would live back in Concord in nearby Orchard House. Nathaniel Hawthorne purchased the house from the Alcotts in 1852. Hawthorne renamed the house the Wayside and made his own additions to the building around 1860. He died in 1864 and his widow sold the house in 1870, but their daughter Rose and her husband, George P. Lathrop later owned it for a time, selling it in 1883 to Boston publisher Daniel Lothrop and his wife Harriett. Under the pen name Margaret Sidney, Harriett wrote The Five Little Peppers series of children’s books, published between 1881 and 1916. They added a large piazza to the west side of the house in 1887. The house was inherited in 1924 by their daughter, Margaret Mulford Lothrop (1884-1970), who worked to preserve the house and opened it for tours. Margaret also wrote a book about the house, The Wayside: Home of Authors (1940). In the 1960s, the house became the first literary site to be acquired by the National Park Service.
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Museum of Russian Icons (1853, 1859, 2006)

by Dan/January 28, 2015/Clinton, Commercial, Industrial, Italianate, Museums, Organizations, Victorian Eclectic

The building at 203 Union Street in Clinton was constructed in 1853 to house the Bigelow Mechanics Institute. This institution was founded in 1846. As described in History of the Origin of the Town of Clinton, Massachusetts, 1653-1865 (1896), by Andrew E. Ford:

April 14, 1846, a petition was made to a justice of peace by H. N. Bigelow, J. R. Stewart, L. F. Bancroft, J. B. Parker, Sanborn Worthen, A. S. Carleton and G. H. Kendall, representing that those gentlemen were “desirous of forming an association for the purpose of mutual improvement and for the further purpose of extending improvement to and throughout the village in which they reside, and the neighborhood with which they are more immediately connected, by sustaining courses of lectures upon the sciences and their connection with the mechanical arts, by sustaining, if their means shall allow it, a school for scientific instruction and education in those branches more immediately connected with their employment, and the collection of a library, a reading room and a repository of ‘models and drawings of useful machines and mechanical inventions.” In answer to this petition, a warrant was issued for a meeting for the purpose of organizing an association with these ends in view.

[. . .] The preamble of the constitution presented and adopted offers a broader basis of organization than was suggested in the petition, namely: “In order to promote our mutual improvement in literature, science and the mechanical arts; —to diffuse a taste for literary, scientific and mechanical pursuits in the community in which we reside;—and to develop the social, moral and intellectual natures with which we arc endowed by one Creator.”

The society took the name “The Bigelow Mechanics’ Institute in Clintonville.” E. B. Bigelow, in whose honor this name had been assumed, in addition to other donations, gave to the society as a recognition of his esteem, the valuable air pump, now used by the Clinton High School, and two hundred dollars to be used for the good of the Institute. A fee of five dollars was charged for membership, and some forty men joined.

At various times, from 1853 to 1873, the Institute also rented out space in the building to the postal service, to the Town of Clinton for its armory and to local businesses. Next door to the Institute, the building at 195 Union Street was built in 1859 to serve as Horatio N. Bigelow‘s private office. The brothers, Horatio N. and Erastus B. Bigelow developed Clinton as an industrial community.

In 1873, the Bigelow Mechanics Institute disbanded and its library was donated to the town to become the Bigelow Free Public Library. The Institute’s old building became a tenement. The adjacent building, H. N. Bigelow’s former office, served as the the Second District Court of Eastern Worcester County from 1886 to 1972, and its basement was the Clinton Police Station until 1969. Both buildings later served as law offices. In recent years the complex has undergone an extensive transformation to house the Museum of Russian Icons, founded in 2006 by art collector and industrialist Gordon B. Lankton. A contemporary, aluminum-clad addition to the museum was constructed in 2008.

Bank Building, Clinton (1881)

by Dan/January 28, 2015/Banks, Clinton, Victorian Eclectic

The building at 79 High Street in Clinton was built in 1881 to house two banks: the Clinton Savings Bank and the First National Bank of Clinton, which became the Clinton Trust Company in 1919. The Clinton Savings Bank moved to a new building in 1929. The building at 79 High Street housed various successor banks to the Clinton Trust Company. It is currently home to a branch of Santander Bank.

203 Church Street, Clinton (1885)

by Dan/January 28, 2015January 28, 2015/Clinton, Commercial, Victorian Eclectic

The building at 203 Church Street in Clinton was built in 1885 and was the town’s first Post Office. The second floor was once rented to the Prescott Club, a private club for businessmen. In the 1940’s, the Liberty Club, an Italian-American organization, purchased the building. Renovated inside in 1987, the building is now used as retail and office space.

Catholic Society Parsonage, Northampton (1866)

by Dan/August 12, 2014August 12, 2014/Houses, Northampton, Victorian Eclectic

The house at 71 King Street in Northampton was built in 1866 to serve as a parsonage for St. Mary’s Catholic church. It was designed by William Fenno Pratt, who also designed a similar parsonage for the Congregational church. Built in 1845, St. Mary’s was Northampton’s first Catholic church. This almost entirely Irish parish constructed a new church on Elm Street in 1885 and a new French-Canadian parish took over the old church. This was later replaced by a new church, the present Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church at 101 King Street. Since the move of St. Mary’s Parish, the old parsonage has been used for other purposes, including as a funeral parlor.

Old Central Fire Station, Clinton (1898)

by Dan/August 11, 2014/Clinton, Public Buildings, Victorian Eclectic

The old Central Fire Station, at 42 Church Street in Clinton, was built in 1898. It was Clinton’s second fire station. A modern fire station was constructed next door in 1983.

First Unitarian Church of Clinton (1853)

by Dan/August 5, 2014August 5, 2014/Churches, Clinton, Neoclassical, Victorian Eclectic

In 1853, three years after the First Unitarian Society of Clinton was organized the society built at church at 250 Church Street. Now the oldest standing church in Clinton, it was erected on land donated by Henry Fairbanks, one of the partners in the Bigelow Carpet Company. The church was raised in 1872 when the current first level was added underneath the original 1853 church. No longer a Unitarian church, in recent years the building has lost its steeple. It is now the Clinton Spanish Seventh Day Adventist Church.