Samuel Gilbert House (1750)

by Dan//Federal, Gloucester, Houses

The house at the corner of Angle Street and 1 Western Avenue in Gloucester was built in 1750 by Nathaniel Ellery. In the 1780s it became the home of Samuel Gilbert (1782-1860), a wealthy merchant, and was raised to three stories early in the nineteenth century. After his death, the house was occupied by his widow, his second wife Mary Hayes Gilbert, who died in 1887 at the age of 101, and by his son, Addison Gilbert (1808-1888). A merchant, banker, and civic leader, Addison Gilbert had no children. Upon his death, he left $100,000 to build the Addison Gilbert Hospital, which opened in 1897. He also left $75,000 to convert his home into the Addison Gilbert Home for the Aged. In 1981, the trustees of the Gilbert estate sold the house to the law firm that is now known as Orlando & Associates.

Ralph Waldo Emerson House (1828)

by Dan//Concord, Greek Revival, Houses

The home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, where the philosopher, essayist, and poet lived from 1835 until his death in 1882, is located at 28 Cambridge Turnpike in Concord. The house was built in 1828 by the Coolidge family and was known as the “Coolidge Castle.” Emerson purchased it from John T. Coolidge for $3,500 and moved in just after he married his second wife, Lydia Jackson (called Lidian). Emerson had previously lived in Concord in his family’s home called the Old Manse. Emerson wrote numerous works while living in the house, which he called Bush, and had many famous visitors, including Henry David Thoreau, who lived with the Emersons at different times and built his famous cabin on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond. The house had to be extensively repaired after a fire in 1872. After Emerson’s death, his wife occupied it and then their unmarried daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, until her death in 1909. Still owned by the Emerson family, the house opened to the public as a private museum in 1930. The contents of his study are now located at the Concord Museum, across the street.

St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic Church (1840)

by Dan//Churches, Concord, Italianate

The St. Bernard’s Catholic Church at 12 Monument Square in Concord was originally erected in 1840 or 1842 by the First Universalist Society in Concord. The small congregation encountered financial difficulties and ended its services in the early 1850s. The church stood empty until the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston purchased it in December 1863. Since the early 1850s, Concord’s growing Irish Catholic community had been a mission of St. Mary’s Parish in Waltham. Now the parish had its own church, St. Bernard’s, which became an independent parish in 1867. At the time, the church was still in its original location, separated from the common by the “old green store.” In 1870, the parish purchased the store in order to move the church forward towards the common. The church was also turned ninety degrees to face southwest toward the foot of Main Street and enlarged with a basement and extended to the rear to accommodate a new vestibule and sanctuary.

Renovations in 1889, designed in the Italianate style by local architect John Chapman, added a steeple and again enlarged the church. Changes were made to the front facade and new front stairs were added in 1959-1960, but another major renovation in 1996-1997 restored the church as much as possible to its late nineteenth-century appearance.

Our Lady Help of Christians Church was built in the industrial area of West Concord in 1904 and became a separate parish in 1908. The two Concord parishes merged in 2004 to form Holy Family Parish, based at St. Bernard’s Church. More recently, Holy Family Parish and St. Irene’s Church in Carlisle joined to form a new parish collaborative.

Concord Bank (1832)

by Dan//Banks, Concord, Greek Revival

The building at 46 Main Street in Concord was erected in 1832 for the Concord Bank (which later became the Concord National Bank) and the Middlesex Mutual Fire Insurance Company (incorporated in 1826), which occupied the first floor for many years. The Middlesex Institution for Savings was founded in 1835 and shared space with the Concord Bank on the second floor. Both institutions were robbed in a famous incident in 1865. By the 1880s, the insurance company had moved out of the first floor, part of which was then occupied by Frank Tuttle’s tailor shop. Starting in 1886, the post office was also located in the building for many years. When the bank vacated the second floor in 1894, Tuttle moved his tailoring business upstairs and continued there until his death in 1913, while the National and American Express companies had their offices on the first floor until 1914. Various office tenants and commercial businesses have occupied the building over the years.

Gloucester Safe Deposit and Trust Company (1880)

by Dan//Banks, Gloucester, Neoclassical

Gloucester Safe Deposit and Trust Company

The building at 189-191 Main Street, at the corner of Duncan Street, in Gloucester was erected circa 1870-1880 and was originally the First National Bank. It was later home to the Gloucester Safe Deposit and Trust Company, incorporated in 1891, around which time the building was remodeled with a “Pigeon Cove” granite Classical Revival facade. In 2013, the former bank building was renovated with first floor space for an art gallery and a jewelry store, and office and apartment space above.

Joseph Foster House (1760)

by Dan//Colonial, Gloucester, Houses

Erected circa 1760, the gambrel roof house at 75 Middle Street in Gloucester was the home of a merchant and Revolutionary War patriot named Joseph Foster (1730-1804). Originally from Ipswich, he became a ship captain, trading with the West Indies. He commanded privateers during the war and was a member of the Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1779-1780.

At the start of the Revolutionary War, Foster was a hero of the Battle of Gloucester. On August 8, 1775, the Bristish sloop HMS Falcon, commanded by Capt. John Linzee, attacked two American schooners heading for Salem. He captured one, but the other escaped to Gloucester harbor and was grounded near Five Pound Island. Capt. Linzee sent barges with men to seize the grounded vessel, but local defenders, Joseph Foster playing a conspicuous part among them, fired on the British and effectively trapped them. In an attempt to distract the townspeople and relieve pressure on his men, Linzee fired Falcon‘s guns on the town of Gloucester, hitting the steeple of the First Church meeting house. He also sent a landing party to set fire to the town, but his men were captured by the locals. He then sent in his captured schooner, but its crewmen revolted and seized the ship. Linzee sailed off on the Falcon.

As related in The grandchildren of Col. Joseph Foster (1885), quoting from Babson’s History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann:

It was in 1779, a “period of great poverty” in Gloucester, when paper money had “depreciated to about one-seventieth of its nominal value,” and “about one-sixth of the whole population were” “living chiefly upon charity,” “that a large troop of women, in want of the necessaries of life, marched to Col. Foster’s store, and made known their determination to supply themselves with provisions and groceries from his stock, in spite of all resistance. Some of the number were prepared to take an exact account of the articles delivered to each person, with reference to payment, if they should ever he able to pay; but, pay or no pay, they would have them, and proceeded to help themselves accordingly. This merchant was one of the most ardent patriots of the town; and it is related of him, that his conduct on this occasion proved him to be one of the most benevolent: for the tale of suffering and destitution that the women had to tell so touched his feelings, that he liberally supplied their wants, and dismissed them with words of the utmost kindness and sympathy ”

After the war, Capt. Foster returned to his farm. The house in town remained in the family until 1859. Since then it has had a number of owners and gone through alterations, serving at different times as a dry goods store, a piano and sweing machine shop, a confectionery shop, the Trust Department of the Cape Ann Bank & Trust Company, and now as offices.

Theodore Sedgwick House (1761)

by Dan//Colonial, Greek Revival, Houses, Sheffield

Although it now has a nineteenth-century Greek Revival appearance with eleven columns, the house at 126 Main Street in Sheffield dates back to 1761. In the 1760s, the house was rented by Dr. Lemuel Barnard, a physician who was one of the signers of the Sheffield Declaration, which was drawn up at the home of John Ashley in 1773. Seen as a predecessor of the Declaration of Independence, the Sheffield Declaration (or Sheffield Resolves) was a list of grievances against the British government and an outline of the basic rights of citizens. In 1768, David Ingersoll sold the house to Theodore Sedgwick, a Sheffield lawyer (born in West Hartford, Connecticut) who had written the text of the Sheffield Declaration. In 1781, he and Tapping Reeve represented Mum Bett, an enslaved woman at the house of John Ashley, who sued for her freedom under the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, part of which stated that “All men are born free and equal.” She won her freedom and took the name Elizabeth Freeman. Sedgwick was a delegate to the Continental Congress and would go on to serve as in the U.S. House and Senate. He was the forth Speaker of the House of Representatives (1799-1801) and served on the Massachusetts Supreme Court from 1802 until his death in 1813. In 1785, he sold the house at 126 Main Street to Elisha Lee, also an attorney, who was appointed the first postmaster of Sheffield in 1784.