The Colonial Revival house at 376 Essex Street in Salem was built around 1894 for businessman Clarence S. Clark, a Morocco manufacturer. The house stands on the site of the Sprague-White House, built c. 1796 and demolished c. 1893, which may have been the work of Samuel McIntire. The Clark House‘s Federal-style two-story carriage house survives to the rear of the property.
The building at 82 Lessey Street in Amherst was built in 1914 by the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity of Amherst College. It replaced the fraternity’s two earlier connected buildings on the site. One of these had been purchased on land acquired in 1883 from Col. W.S. Clark, President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now UMASS Amherst) and the second was built next to it in 1886. The new Georgian Revival fraternity house was designed by Lionel Moses II of the firm of McKim, Meade & White and has a doorway modeled on that of Westover, the eighteenth-century Virginia plantation house of William Byrd II. The fraternity house became an Amherst College dormitory, named Plimpton House, in 1984.
In 1926, an old livery stable, built in 1879 on the site of where the old Amherst Academy (attended by Emily Dickinson) had once stood, was rebuilt as the Amherst Cinema. The Cinema, at 28 Amity Street, continued in operation until 1999, by which time the building had already been in a deteriorating condition for some years. The vacant theater was then acquired by local residents who were seeking to turn it into a cultural and performing arts center. Developer Barry Roberts and architect John Kuhn relocated the three-screen cinema to the rear of the building and adapted the rest for retail, restaurant and office space. The Amherst Cinema Arts Center opened in 2006. A new mural has recently been added to the west side of the building, joining the vintage graffiti that reads “Save the Drake” and “For Willy, for humanity.”
The Elizabeth Cary Agassiz House, on the campus of Radcliffe College in Cambridge, was built in 1904 as the school’s student center. The building was named for the first president of Radcliffe, which is now part of Harvard University and is called the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Continue reading “Agassiz House, Radcliffe (1904)”
The house of the President of Amherst College was built in 1834-1835. An earlier house, built in 1821-1822, had been considered too damp and unhealthy, so the current house was then built on higher ground, across South Pleasant Street from the main campus buildings. The house, originally designed in the Greek Revival style by Warren Slade Howland, was remodeled in 1891 and again in 1932, with a Georgian Revival style entryway on the north side. The above picture was taken while the most recent renovations on the house were underway this past summer.
Although surrounded by eighteenth and nineteenth century period buildings, Bullard Tavern at Old Sturbridge Village was built in 1946-1947. Although resembling an early New England house or tavern, it was not designed as a strictly accurate historical reproduction. Bullard Tavern was built as a service building, originally intended to provide visitor amenities and exhibit space, but it soon became a restaurant. The woodwork in the Tavern’s Tap Room was salvaged from an eighteenth-century house in Brooklyn, Connecticut.
Gaylord Memorial Library in South Hadley was built in 1904 on what had been the village cemetery. To make way for the library, the graves were moved to Evergreen Cemetery on Hadley Street; all except for the grave of John Preston, the original donor of the land. Preston had received the grant of land for his services as a soldier in the French and Indian War. The Library was donated by William H. Gaylord and was designed by Putnam and Cox of Boston. It was dedicated on May 18, 1904 and Gaylord and his wife, Betsey Stone Gaylord, both died on December 22, 1904. The Gaylord Library was operated independently, but from 1968 to 1995, it was run as a branch of the South Hadley Public Library. Facing closure by the town due to a lack of money, the Library has since operated independently again, although with more limited hours.
