Ebenezer Chandler Colton built a house around 1790 on Longmeadow Avenue in Longmeadow. The home’s original center chimney was later removed and around 1848, the house was converted to a two-family home. In 1855, the house was moved to its current location along the Avenue by James Coomes, who again made it a single-family home.
Israel Gates was a blacksmith in Longmeadow who, from around 1830 into the 1860s, lived in a house along the Town Green. Gates played a bass viol, which is now on display in the nearby Storrs House. According to local tradition, the Gates House began as a millinery on the green, which was moved to its current location, being joined to a much earlier home, occupied in 1805 by John Gaylord, which is now the east wing of the house.
The Stebbins-Hammett House began as a brick house, painted red, built in 1795 for Benjamin Stebbins, in the year following his marriage to Lucy Colton. In the twentieth century, the house was owned by the Hammatt family (Julia B. Hammatt was a graduate of Wellesley in 1925). The house was eventually completely rebuilt in wood, with the exception of the two original brick front rooms on the first floor.
Lenox Academy was built in 1803, on Main Street in Lenox. According to Rev. Raymond DeWitt Mallary, in Lenox and the Berkshire Highlands (1902), wrote:
To be a graduate of Lenox Academy was not only a distinction, it was a passport to any college, and often to the sophomore class of a higher institution of learning. The papers of the day within a radius of a hundred miles refer to this preparatory school with glowing commendation. Its pupils came from widely separated portions of the country and the fame of its examinations, which were of unusual rigidity, attracted visitors from long distances, who repaired to their homes to spread the report of them. The tuition was very moderate, —$7 a term of fourteen weeks; and board reached the not exorbitant sum of “$1.25 to $1.50 per week in good families.” The tradition has survived that one pupil (long a distinguished educator and only lately deceased) ” lived like a dandy because he had rooms at the hotel, for which he paid $2 per week.” Lenox Academy flourished until 1866.
The building housed various schools until the 1920s and was saved from demolition in 1947 when the town took it over. It housed various public organizations and today it is the headquarters of the Lenox Historical Society, which operates the Museum of Lenox History.
Deerfield Academy was founded in 1797 and a brick building, designed by Asher Benjamin, was built to house the school in 1799. The Academy later expanded and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association purchased the old school building in 1877. The building was renovated and opened in 1880 as the Memorial Hall Museum, displaying a collection of objects gathered by antiquarian George Sheldon. Memorial Hall continues today as a museum of Deerfield history and an adjacent building houses the libraries of the PVMA and Historic Deerfield.
The Cordis House in Longmeadow is a late Federal-style house with Greek Revival elements, built at 715 Longmeadow Street in 1832. It was originally constructed as a parsonage, occupied first by Rev. Jonathan B. Condit, who is described in Proceedings at the Centennial Celebration of the Incorporation of the Town of Longmeadow (1883), as “youthful, singularly winning, ornate, magnetic—for personal attractions most admired of all the occupants of our pastorate, before or since.” The house was then occupied by Condit’s successor, Rev. Hubbard Beebe. In 1845, the house was bought by Thomas Cordis, a Boston merchant, and has ever since been occupied by the Cordis family. The brick house’s elaborate porch ironwork was added in the late nineteenth century.
When Wayland’s 1725 First Parish meetinghouse was taken down, in 1814-1815, to make way for a new church, materials from the old building were used to construct a house and store just to the east. Originally known as the Old Green Store, it has a hipped roof and a second-floor meeting hall, which was used by the town from 1815 to 1845. This hall was constructed as part of the builders’ deal to get the old meetinghouse’s beams and timbers in exchange for letting the town use the hall for thirty years. In 1825, when the First Parish church was split between Calvinists and Unitarians, Rev. Lyman Beecher held a series of meetings in the hall to denounce the Unitarians. In 1849, choir members used the meeting room to rehearse the new hymn by Rev. Edmund Sears, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” The house was later converted into a summer residence, named Kirkside, by William Bullard, a wealthy Cambridge banker, in 1889. He expanded and updated the house to the Colonial Revival style and placed elaborate French wallpaper in the meeting hall/ballroom. In 1920, the house was purchased by William C. Loring, an artist who taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and his wife, Mildred Loring, an antiques dealer, who used the meeting hall as her sales room. The restoration of the house by its current owners, in 1991, was featured on the PBS television program, This Old House.