Category: Houses

Saugus Iron Works House (1680)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Saugus

Going back to 1646, the Saugus Iron Works were the first integrated ironworks in North America. Various buildings of the Iron Works complex were reconstructed in the 1950s on their original sites and are today part of the Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site. A timber-framed seventeenth-century house, traditionally called the “Old Iron Works House,” is also located on the site. It was once believed to have been built in 1646, but is now thought to have been constructed in the 1680s, about a decade after the Iron Works ceased production in 1668. The first known resident of the house, from 1681 to 1688, was Samuel Appleton. By the early twentieth century, the house had become a tenement and had been much altered. In 1915, it was purchased by Wallace Nutting, antiquarian and entrepreneur, who hired Boston architect Henry Charles Dean to restore the house. Nutting renamed the restored house “Broadhearth” and it became part of his chain of colonial homes. As with his other properties, Nutting took photographs of his models posing in the house, which he marketed through a catalog. He soon hired a blacksmith to work at the site, but eventually decided to sell the property to an antiques dealer from Boston.

Capt. Gideon Colton House (1794)

by Dan//Federal, Houses, Longmeadow

Built around 1794-1796, the house of Capt. Gideon Colton is a Federal-style residence at 1028 Longmeadow Street in Longmeadow. It was constructed with beams cut from trees on the Colton property. When the house was photographed in 1934 for the Historic American Buildings Survey, it still displayed the later additions of a balustrade on the roof and an elaborate entry portico, which have since been removed.

John Palmer House (1683)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Marblehead

One of the oldest houses in Marblehead is the John Palmer House at 11 Hooper Street. The house was built in 1683 and has framing timbers made of English walnut, salvaged from a sailing vessel (one timber was formerly a mast and still displays rope marks). The two houses on either side immediately adjoin the Palmer House. Today, the house has sash windows, which long ago replaced the original irregularly spaced casement windows.

Robinson-Little House (1808)

by Dan//Federal, Houses, Salem

Around 1808-9, mason James Nichols built a brick Federal residence at 10 Chestnut Street in Salem for Nathan Robinson, a merchant. He lived there until the 1830s, after which other families owned the house. From 1890 to 1939, it was home to Philip Little, an artist who was a friend and neighbor to the American Impressionist painter, Frank W. Benson. The house’s Greek Revival entrance was added around 1855.

George Peabody House (1790)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Peabody

Peabody, originally South Danvers, is named after George Peabody, a merchant, financier and philanthropist. He spent his early career in Baltimore and in 1837 took up residence in London, where he remained until his death in 1869. During his lifetime he was the benefactor of numerous institutions, including the Peabody Institute Library (1852), the Peabody Institute Library of Danvers (1856), the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University (1857), the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University (1866), the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University (1866) and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem (1867). George Peabody was born in South Danvers in 1795 in a house his father Thomas rented and soon purchased at 205 Washington Street. Built around 1790, the house passed to George Peabody’s older brother David in 1811, who took out two mortgages on the property the following year. In 1816, George Peabody purchased the house, where his mother resided until her death in 1830. Peabody sold it two years later and it has had many owners over the years. In the twentieth century, it housed workers of the American Glue Company (later Eastman Gelatin). In 1989, the City of Peabody purchased the house and restored it to become the George Peabody House Museum.

Lindall-Gibbs-Osgood House (1755)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Salem

The Lindall-Gibbs-Osgood House is a gambrel-roofed residence at 314 Essex Street in Salem. Located between the “Witch House” and First Church, it was built for Mary Lindall and later had other owners, including the Gibbs family. In 1825, it was bought by Capt. William Osgood and remained in his family until was acquired by the Red Cross in the 1940s. The house continues as an office building today. According to The Colonial Architecture of Salem (1919), by Frank Cousins and Phil M. Riley, it was in this house

where Benjamin Thompson, afterward Count Rumford, commander-in-chief of the Bavarian army, lived as a boy and made some of his early experiments. Rumford ovens, invented by this eminent scientist and author, are to be found in several of the larger old mansions of Salem, a few of them even now finding occasional use.

At the age of 13, Thompson was apprenticed to John Appleton, a merchant who owned the house at the time.