Built around 1700, the Loring Parsonage in Sudbury Center was later the home of Reverend Israel Loring, who became the first minister to serve west of the Sudbury River, settling there in 1723. The Parsonage was later known as the Wheeler-Haynes House and Walter Haynes kept a tavern there. Today the house, which is located behind the town hall, is owned by the town, having meeting rooms and other space which is rented to a credit union.
When Wayland’s 1725 First Parish meetinghouse was taken down, in 1814-1815, to make way for a new church, materials from the old building were used to construct a house and store just to the east. Originally known as the Old Green Store, it has a hipped roof and a second-floor meeting hall, which was used by the town from 1815 to 1845. This hall was constructed as part of the builders’ deal to get the old meetinghouse’s beams and timbers in exchange for letting the town use the hall for thirty years. In 1825, when the First Parish church was split between Calvinists and Unitarians, Rev. Lyman Beecher held a series of meetings in the hall to denounce the Unitarians. In 1849, choir members used the meeting room to rehearse the new hymn by Rev. Edmund Sears, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” The house was later converted into a summer residence, named Kirkside, by William Bullard, a wealthy Cambridge banker, in 1889. He expanded and updated the house to the Colonial Revival style and placed elaborate French wallpaper in the meeting hall/ballroom. In 1920, the house was purchased by William C. Loring, an artist who taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, and his wife, Mildred Loring, an antiques dealer, who used the meeting hall as her sales room. The restoration of the house by its current owners, in 1991, was featured on the PBS television program, This Old House.
Located not far from Wayside Inn Road (which leads to Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury), is the Amos and Jonas Darling House, a Colonial Cape-style cottage (much added to over the years) on the Boston Post Road in Marlborough. Overlooking Hager’s Pond across the road, the house was most likely built around 1760 by Amos Darling, Sr., who came from Framingham (It may also have been built as early as 1726 and later bought by Darling). His sons were Jonas and Amos Darling, Jr. The family was associated with the nearby Hager sawmill and Amos, Jr. married Lovice Hager, daughter of Ebenezer Hager, Jr., in 1800. The house was later owned by Lovice’s cousin, Ephraim Hager. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was owned by George Jones and was known as Jones’s Tavern. The Jones property and the Hager Sawmill were acquired by Henry Ford in the 1920s, when he was developing the Wayside Inn as an historic attraction.
Having earlier lived in what is now known as the Coomes-Almquist House, around 1840 Horatio Coomes built a brick house at 918 Longmeadow Street in Longmeadow. In building this early Italianate house, Coomes undoubtedly used bricks produced in his own brickyard.
The house of Horatio Coomes at the south end of Longmeadow Green was built around 1831, although parts may have been built earlier, as there were buildings on the property when it was sold to Coomes in 1826. Coomes later built another home nearby and the sold the earlier house, which is now known as the Coomes-Almquist House. Many rooms were added to the expanding house over the years.
The earliest parts of the Jonathan Harrington House, on Lexington Green, date back to 1690. The house‘s most famous historic association is with the Battle of Lexington, as the historic marker on the house explains: “House of Jonathan Harrington/
who wounded on the Common/ April 19, 1775/ dragged himself to the door/ and died at his wife’s feet.” From 1811 to 1828, the Harrington House was the home of John Augustus, a shoemaker, who in 1841 convinced a judge to allow a man convicted of drunkenness into his custody for rehabilitation, finding him a job and getting him to sign a pledge not to drink. Augustus followed this by offering assistance to other convicted criminals and he is now recognized as the Father of Probation in America. In 1909, pioneering historic preservationist William Sumner Appleton expressed his outrage at modernizations being made to the Harrington House during a refurbishment (possibly by new owner Leroy Sunderland Brown?) The house remains a private home.
When the Town of Wayland built a new town hall in 1878, the historic Grout-Heard House had to be moved from its original location, on Cochituate Road, to a new lot nearby. The town hall was demolished in 1958 and in 1962, the house was moved back to its original location! The house was probably built around 1740 by Jonathan Grout, descendant of an early settler of Wayland (then part of Sudbury). In 1744, he sold it to his brother-in-law, Richard Heard. The house was later sold out of the family and at the time of the Battles of Lexington and Concord housed the store of Elijah Bent. In 1787, the house was acquired by Silas Grout, a blacksmith, who operated his shop just south of the house. Silas Grout enlarged the house and updated the facade. One of his daughters, Jerusaha Grout, married Newell Heard, a shopkeeper. Their son, John Augustus Heard, was a noted photographer in the nineteenth century and his wife, Sarah Hawkes Heard, was Wayland’s librarian at the end of the century. In 1955, Raytheon Corporation bought the house and donated it to the Wayland Historical Society. Now, placed just a few feet back from its original foundation, the house is open as a museum.
