Category: Public Buildings

Old Wayland Town Hall (1841)

by Dan//Greek Revival, Public Buildings, Wayland

Old Wayland Town Hall

Proceedings at the Dedication of the Town Hall, Wayland, December 24, 1878; with Brief Historical Sketches of Public Buildings and Libraries, Vol. 1, (1879), contains the following about the building of the Old Town Hall of Wayland:

In 1840, the common land on which the old meeting-house had stood having been sold in the mean time to Dea[con] James Draper, he proposed to erect a new building on a part of the same, for the use of the town, to contain a town-hall, a school-room, with anterooms, etc., for the sum of seventeen hundred dollars. His proposal was accepted, and the building was first occupied for town meetings Nov. 8, 1841. Subsequently the hall was used also for an academy, under Rev. L. P. Frost. The library occupied a part of the lower floor, and for this and other public uses it served the town until the erection of the new building in 1878.

The new building was located across the street. The Old Town Hall later served as a grocery store and today houses offices.

Waltham Museum (Old Waltham Police Station) (1892)

by Dan//Public Buildings, Queen Anne, Waltham

Waltham Museum

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.

Salem Custom House (1819)

by Dan//Federal, Public Buildings, Salem

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The last in a series of 13 custom houses built in Salem since 1649, the Salem Custom House of 1819 is famous for being featured in the introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne worked in the Custom House for the U.S. Custom Service as Surveyor in 1846-1849. The building housed offices and an attached warehouse, the Public Stores, which contained bonded and impounded cargo. The structure was designed in the Federal style by Perley Putnam, a Weigher and Gauger for the U.S. Custom Service. A wooden eagle, carved by Salem craftsman Joseph True, was placed atop the Custom House in 1826. It was was replaced with a fiberglass replica in 2004. The Custom House is now a part of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site.

US Post Office, Deerfield (1912)

by Dan//Colonial Revival, Deerfield, Public Buildings

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Built in 1912, the United States Post Office in Deerfield was remodeled in 1952 to look like Deerfield’s third meeting house, which was in use from 1696 to 1728. It originally stood on Deerfield’s town common. An original picture of the meeting house is on the upper right corner of a drawing of town, Delineated Deerfield, by Dudley Woodbridge, a physician from Mystic, Connecticut who kept a 5-page journal of his 1728 journey from Cambridge to Sunderland.

Hampden County Courthouse (1874)

by Dan//Public Buildings, Romanesque Revival, Springfield

Built between 1871 and 1874, the Hampden County Courthouse was designed by H.H. Richardson and represents a stage in the development of his distinctive style. Located on Elm Street in Springfield, the structure replaced an earlier courthouse of 1822. In the 1860s, the county commissioners had resisted popular pressure to construct a new courthouse, but when the commissioners were threatened with an indictment in 1869 for not safekeeping deeds and public records in fireproof rooms, they relented and a new building was constructed. Between 1908 and 1912, a large addition was built, designed by the firm of Richardson’s successors, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge.