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.
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.
The Wayside Inn in Sudbury is the oldest operating Inn in the United States and was immortalized in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow‘s sequence of poems, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). Built in 1716, the Inn was first known as Howe’s Tavern, for its first innkeeper, David Howe. His descendants continued to operate the Inn, adding to the original structure over time, until 1861. These included Howe’s son, Ezekiel, who led the Sudbury militia to Concord for the battle of April 19, 1775. After passing from the Howes to new owners, the Inn served as a boarding house for temporary lodgers. In October of 1862, Longfellow and his publisher, James Fields, visited the Inn and this inspired the poet to write Tales of a Wayside Inn, which became a bestseller. Although it continued to serve as a boarding house, the Wayside Inn soon began to attract tourists, anxious to see the place which had captured the public imagination. In 1896, Edward Rivers Lemon, a wealthy Medford wool merchant, purchased the Inn as a business venture, inviting the Society of Colonial Wars to meet there in 1897. On that occasion, the orator Samuel Arthur Bent gave a speech entitled: “The Wayside Inn—Its History and Literature.” Lemon intended the Inn to be a literary and artistic retreat and a group artists, poets, and writers, known as the Paint and Clay Club, met there frequently.
The Wayside Inn entered a new phase of its existence when it was purchased by Henry Ford in 1923. He intended to create a living museum of Americana centered on the historic building and bought many acres of land around it. He built a gristmill and the non-denominational Martha-Mary Chapel on the property and and also relocated a schoolhouse from Sterling, which he believed was the actual building mentioned in Sarah Josepha Hale‘s poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The property was placed in a non-profit trust in 1947, with many representatives of the Ford family on the Board, and this transitioned to governance by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1957. Restoration of the Inn was necessary, with help from the Ford family, after a devastating fire in December 1955. As of 1960, the Inn came under the governance of local trustees. There would be no further support coming from Ford interests and there was no endowment, but by this time the Inn had become self-sufficient as an inn, restaurant and museum.
Below are pictures of some interiors in the museum section of the Inn: Continue reading “Longfellow’s Wayside Inn (1716)”
Munroe Tavern, located one mile east of Lexington Common, was built around 1695. The Tavern is named for William Munroe, who was its proprietor from 1770 to 1827. Munroe was also an orderly sergeant in Captain Parker’s minuteman company in 1775. During the Battle of Lexington, on April 19, 1775, the Tavern was occupied by the British for an hour-and-a-half. The Tavern‘s dining room became a field hospital and Brigadier General Earl Percy, who arrived with British reinforcements, used it as his headquarters. George Washington dined at the Tavern during his 1789 visit to the Lexington battlefield. The Tavern is now a museum operated by the Lexington Historical Society.
Buckman Tavern, off Lexington Green, was built in 1690 by Benjamin Muzzey and by a license granted in 1693, it became the first Public House in Lexington. In the coming years it was run by Muzzey‘s son John, then by John’s granddaughter and her husband, John Buckman. By the 1770s, Buckman Tavern had become the favored gathering place for local militia men (members of the Lexington Training Band) on the days they trained on the Green. On April 19, 1775, it was here that the militia gathered before facing the British troops, when the first shot was fired which began the Revolutionary War. The Tavern continued to be Lexington’s busiest after the war and housed the towns first village store and post office. The town of Lexington acquired the Tavern in 1913 and, by a 99-year lease, the Lexington Historical Society undertook the furnishing of the building, which is open to the public as a museum.
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.
