At 4 Main Street in Stockbridge is the the First Congregational Church, built in 1824. The church began in 1734 with John Sergeant‘s mission to the Mahican people of the Berkshire Hills. The first church building, erected in 1739, stood where the Chime Tower is today. The second church building, built in 1785, stood at the foot of Old Meeting House Road. The current brick church was restructured in 1865 to accommodate a Johnson Organ.
In 1868 Clinton K. Lambson purchased the property at 89 Elm Street in Westfield. There may have been a building on the property, built in 1860, or Lambson may have erected a new commercial building, c. 1868. The building would be home to Lambson Furniture Company for over 120 years. Up to the mid-1980s it was run by Rita Devine. As was common of furniture stores at the time, the company also included an undertaking business in its earlier years. The building underwent significant changes in 1924, when a fourth floor was added and the facade was altered: the original brick cornice was removed and the second floor was changed over to plate glass windows.
The house at 111 Pleasant Street in Northampton was built around 1800. In 1836 it was purchased by Sylvester Graham, who lived there until his death in 1851. Sylvester Graham was a dietary reformer and temperance advocate who emphasized vegetarianism and baking a type of bread made with unbolted wheat flour, known as Graham Flour. The Graham Cracker is also named for him. The house‘s original gable roof was later replaced with a mansard roof.
The house at 149 Elm Street in Northampton was built around 1886 on the site of earlier houses owned by the Sage and Clark families. From 1935 to 1958 it was owned by the Eames family as a guest house (appropriately called Eames Home) that was frequented by guests of Smith College students.
At 2273 Main Street and Carew Street in Springfield is a Romanesque-style structure known as the Trolley Barn. Designed by the local architectural firm of Gardner, Pyne & Gardner, it was built in 1897 and served as offices, terminal, garage, and maintenance facility for the Springfield Street Railway Company (formed in 1870). It was once one of several trolley barns along Main Street that serviced the city’s streetcars. Trolleys were eventually overtaken by buses and in 1958 the building was acquired by Peter Pan Bus Lines, which used it as both a bus garage and as a corporate office. Peter Pan later moved to a larger facility. The Trolley Barn was renovated in the early 1980s and then turned over to Coach Builders, Inc., a Peter Pan affiliate that that specialized in rebuilding and refurbishing old buses. A minivan crashed into the corner of the building on January 15, 2015.
The house at 159 Chestnut Street in Holyoke was built around 1870 for James Hale Newton (1832-1921), president of the Chemical Paper Company and the Home National Bank. In 1879 he established the Wauregan Mill, one of six he organized in Holyoke. In 1907, Newton moved to a larger house on the outskirts of the city. His old house house later briefly served (1911-1918) as the Holyoke Club. It was acquired in 1919 for the Holyoke Day Nursery, founded in 1916 and run by the Sisters of Providence. The building was enlarged in 1947 and attached to the neighboring carriage house.
The origin of the Town of Harvard’s first Town Hall, or Townhouse, is described by Henry S. Nourse in his 1894 History of Harvard:
The earliest movement looking to the building of a hall especially adapted for the transaction of the town’s business was on April 7, 1807, when a committee was appointed to consider the proposition. The report of the committee was probably adverse, as no further action in the matter is recorded, and the town-meetings continued to be held in the meeting-house as they had been from the first. In 1827 the subject was again agitated, perhaps stirred by some natural objections on the part of the first parish to submit their place of worship to the defilement and injury incident to its frequent use by mixed and sometimes disorderly assemblies. A town-meeting debated the question of the town’s right to use the meeting-house, and finally referred it to a special committee for investigation. Samuel Hoar, Esq., was consulted, and advised the town that the edifice was the property of the first parish exclusively, and that a precisely similar case had already been decided by the supreme court in favor of the church in Medford. A for a new building for the town’s use, forty-four by thirty-four feet, estimated to cost seven hundred dollars, but the whole subject was dismissed at that time.
May 5, 1828, a town-meeting was called at the Baptist meeting-house in Still River, and then it was voted to proceed with the erection of a town house at once. The building was placed on the north-eastern portion of the common, across the highway from the present town hall, where E. W. Houghton’s barn now stands. It faced to the south, and had four Tuscan columns supporting the front gable. There was no provision for warming it until 1832, when a chimney was built and a stove purchased.
After a new Town Hall was built in 1871, the old Townhouse was moved slightly to the north (current address 14 Ayer Road) and converted into a residence by George L . Sawyer, who sold it to his father Arad Sawyer. Later in the nineteenth century it was owned by Sawyer’s daughter Sarah and her husband, Charles P. Atherton.