The W. F. Clark House, at 14 Fairfield Street in Springfield, is an eclectic late Queen Anne house (built 1901-1902) that has Dutch Colonial-style gables and Colonial Revival Palladian windows. The house bears a strong resemblance to the Henry Dwight Bradburn House in Hartford, Connecticut.
At 61 Harvard Street in Worcester is the impressive Salisbury House, an unusual example of the Greek Revival style, built in 1835-1838 for Stephen Salisbury II by master builder Elias Carter. Stephen Salisbury II was a wealthy financier, civic leader and philanthropist. His son, Stephen Salisbury III, continued to live in the house after his father’s death in 1884. He was also a philanthropist and a founder of the Worcester Art Museum in 1896. When Stephen Salisbury III died in 1905, he left the house to the Museum, which used it for the Art Museum School until 1939. Two years later it was sold to the Worcester American Red Cross which uses the building as its headquarters. When Harvard Street was widened in 1931, the house was moved a few feet northwest of its original site.
The Manse is a house at 54 Prospect Street in Northampton. It was built in 1744 (or as early as 1737?) on the foundation of the original 1684 parsonage house of Rev. Solomon Stoddard, Northampton’s second minister and the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards. The original house passed to Rev. Stoddard’s son, Colonel John Stoddard, who built the current house. Col. Stoddard negotiated the return of the captives taken to Canada from the Deerfield Raid of 1704. The Stoddard family owned the house until 1812. A later resident was Josiah Gilbert Holland, an editor of the Springfield Republican and a founder and editor of Scribner’s Monthly. Holland also wrote novels, poetry and such non-fiction works as a History of Western Massachusetts (1855) and an influential biography of Abraham Lincoln, published in 1866. He and his wife Elizabeth were also friends and frequent corespondents of Emily Dickinson. The house’s cupola is a mid-nineteenth-century addition. The house was an inn for a time in the twentieth century.
Harvard Shaker Village was divided into separate complexes known as the Church, North, South, and East Families. Among the buildings that survive from the South Family is the large Dwelling House (or Dormitory), constructed in 1846/1848 (its current address is 101 South Shaker Road). It is joined at the rear to the laundry, or washhouse, built in 1823 (or perhaps as early as 1800). With their numbers dwindling in later years, the Shakers sold the building in 1899 and the remaining members of the South Family moved to join the Church family. The Dwelling House was later used as a chicken coop and in the 1940s as a fresh-air camp for city children. In 2003, it was converted into living space. The Dwelling House has a bell tower containing its original bell. The building also retains 65 original windows. Continue reading “Harvard Shaker South Family Dwelling House (1846)”
The Ministry’s Shop at Harvard Shaker Village was built in 1847-1848. For half of each month, it was the residence and workplace of the Ministry–the Elders who governed a bishopric that included both the Harvard and Shirley Shaker villages. The building, at 84 Shaker Road in Harvard, is now a private residence. It has a wing and ell that were added in the 1930s by architect Stanley Bruce Elwell.
Replacing an earlier office next door (now at the Fruitlands Museum), the Harvard Shakers built the structure known as the New Office Building (or Second Trustees’ Office) the at 78 Shaker Road in 1840-1841. Here the Harvard Shakers had their dealings with the outside world. The large building housed the community’s Trustees, hired help and visitors (among whom were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne). A shop on the first floor sold the Shaker Sisters’ fancy work. In 1935/1936, architect Stanley Bruce Elwell remodeled the interior of the building as a summer residence for Robert Treat Paine. The novelist Thomas Wolfe was once interested in buying the house which, like the other buildings of the Harvard Shaker Village, remains a private residence.
The second house or dormitory to be built by the Shakers of Harvard was constructed in 1795. The Harvard Shakers divided their community into separate complexes: the Church, North, South, and East Families. Located at 79 Shaker Road, the Second House is the only surviving Church Family dwelling house. About 1860/1870, it was enlarged from a gambrel to a gable roof structure. The Shaker Second House was later owned by Dr. Benjamin Woodbury, who divided it into rental apartments during the Second World War. The house remains a private residence today.
