At nos. 350-352 Essex Street in Salem is a late Italianate double house built in 1875. No. 352 was home to Arthur S. Rogers, treasurer of the Atlantic Car Company, and no. 350 was home to Benjamin W. Russell, a teller (later president) at the Salem National Bank.
The house at 159 First Street in Pittsfield is an example of houses were expanded in the nineteenth century as their owners became more affluent. The rear of the house dates to c. 1850, but the more substantial front section, along the street, was added in 1876.
It can be argued that at least one of the places that the Industrial Revolution in America began was in Waltham in 1813, when Francis Cabot Lowell and The Boston Associates established the Boston Manufacturing Company, which produced cotton textiles. They hired mechanic Paul Moody of Amesbury to design and build the machinery and mill along the Charles River in Waltham. The BMC mills employed a method of production called the Waltham-Lowell System that was later duplicated by the Boston Associates on a larger scale at the famous mills in Lowell and would be copied by other industries. The image above displays the long factory building of the Boston Manufacturing Company which was constructed in three sections. The section on the far right, up to the tower, was built in 1813-1814. Closer to the second tower (seen in the distance) is the mill constructed in 1816. These two buildings were later joined by the middle section, built in 1843. Beyond the second tower, at an angle to the earlier buildings, is a mill constructed in 1852. The 1813-1843 buildings now contain senior housing and artists lofts. The image below shows the 1873-1880 mill building with attached smokestack along the Charles River. This section is now the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation.
Holyoke‘s most striking old factory building was constructed by the Albion Paper Company at what is now 15 Water Street. An earlier mill building on the site, belonging to the Hampton Company, was acquired by the Albion Company after the latter was formed in 1869. The Albion Company was sold to D.H. & J.C. Newton in 1877, who rebuilt the mill complex with substantial additions in 1878. The building features two mansard-roofed towers (the second one added post-1887), whose bells summoned workers for their shifts. The company manufactured book paper and engine sized flat paper. After experiencing accumulating large debts in the 1890s, the company was incorporated into the American Writing Paper Company in 1899. Another adjacent mill building, which was built circa 1880 by the Nonotuck Paper Company and later became the Mt. Tom Division of American Writing Paper Company, was destroyed by a fire earlier this year.
The Isaac S. Parsons House is an Italianate residence, built in 1860 at 4 Park Street in the village of Florence in Northampton. The house was designed by E.C. Gardner, who was an architect and author. Originally from Florence, he later settled in Springfield. Isaac S. Parsons ran a store, I. S. Parsons & Co., on Nonotuck Street and became Florence’s first postmaster in 1852, a position he held for 16 years. He was an organizer of the Florence Manufacturing Company. The house was sold in 1889 to Henry F. Cutler, one of the owners of Cutler, Plympton and Co., a grocery and dry goods business. Cutler was also post master. The house has lost its original Italianate cupola.
The Perkins Block, at 335-337 Dwight Street (corner of Main Street–the old Depot Square) in Holyoke, was built in circa 1872-1875. It features detailed cornice and window surrounds, all done in metal. An early tenant of the building was John Eaton Chase, who ran a mill supply store.
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was a major poet and for 50 years was editor and publisher of The New York Evening Post. He was born in a log cabin in Cummington. When he was two, Bryant‘s father, Dr. Peter Bryant, moved the family to a house in Cummington that the doctor’s father-in-law had built in circa 1783-1785. The house became young William Cullen Bryant‘s boyhood home and is now called the William Cullen Bryant Homestead. In 1865, after the old farmhouse had been out of the family for 30 years, Bryant purchased and extensively altered it in to reflect Victorian stylistic tastes. He began by raising the original section of the house, creating a new ground floor. He also added a gambrel-roofed study, a replica of his father’s medical office, which projects from the front facade, and constructed an addition to the house’s original rear ell. The renovated house would serve as his summer home until his death. It is now owned by the Trustees of Reservations and can be toured by the public. Continue reading “William Cullen Bryant Homestead (1785)”
