The Booth-Allen House, on Longmeadow Green, was built in 1795 by David Booth. The Booth family lived there for almost a century thereafter. In 1896, John Allen moved the house to its current location, which is further back from the street and a few feet north of where it had stood before.
The late Georgian brick house of Deacon Nathaniel Ely is at 674 Longmeadow Street in Longmeadow. It was built in 1780 (originally to house two families, father and son) and is referred to as the “Old” Nathaniel Ely House to differentiate it from the “New” Nathaniel Ely House nearby, built in 1856. The house’s projecting portico is probably a later Colonial Revival addition. Deacon Ely was a captain in the Revolutionary War and Tory prisoners, on their way from Boston to New York, were kept in his house during the war. Dacon Ely’s fourth wife was a widow, Martha Williams Raynolds, daughter of Longmeadow’s minister, Rev. Stephen Williams. As children, Rev. Williams and his sister Eunice had been abducted in the 1704 Raid on Deerfield. Stephen returned to Massachusetts with their father, Rev. John Williams, but Eunice remained in Canada, marrying a Mohawk man and converting to Roman Catholicism. In 1800, Thomas Thorakwaneken Williams, Eunice’s grandson, arrived in Longmeadow with his two sons, Eleazer and John, who were to stay with the Ely’s while they were educated at a local school. John later returned to Canada, but Eleazer Williams remained and attempted to become a Congregational minister, although he faced resistance from relatives due to his Indian heritage. He eventually became a missionary and later claimed to be the Lost Dauphin, son of the executed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette!
In 1744, Matthew Keep purchased a house on Longmeadow Green which had originally been owned by Nathaniel Bliss. Matthew’s ancestors, John Keep and his family, had been killed by Indians while crossing from the “long meddowe” by Pecousic Brook to attend church services in Springfield in 1676. Longmeadow became a separate precinct from Springfield in 1713, the same year the earliest section of the Bliss-Keep House (now at the rear of the building) was built. The front section was completed in 1733.
The history of the Wayland Free Public Library goes back to 1848, making it the first free public library in Massachusetts. Starting in 1850, the library was located in the old Town Hall building (now used as offices). In 1879, the library moved to the new town hall, until the current library building was completed in 1900. The land and funds for the building were provided by Warren G. Roby, a Wayland resident. The brick library was designed by Weston architect, Samuel W. Mead, and the structure displays his interest in Roman architecture and Renaissance sculpture. The architectural firm of Cabot, Everett and Mead also designed the library in Arlington. The library was expanded and renovated in 1987-1988.
Proceedings at the Dedication of the Town Hall, Wayland, December 24, 1878; with Brief Historical Sketches of Public Buildings and Libraries, Vol. 1, (1879), contains the following about the building of the Old Town Hall of Wayland:
In 1840, the common land on which the old meeting-house had stood having been sold in the mean time to Dea[con] James Draper, he proposed to erect a new building on a part of the same, for the use of the town, to contain a town-hall, a school-room, with anterooms, etc., for the sum of seventeen hundred dollars. His proposal was accepted, and the building was first occupied for town meetings Nov. 8, 1841. Subsequently the hall was used also for an academy, under Rev. L. P. Frost. The library occupied a part of the lower floor, and for this and other public uses it served the town until the erection of the new building in 1878.
The new building was located across the street. The Old Town Hall later served as a grocery store and today houses offices.
Located on a green in the center of Wayland is the Mellen Law Office. It was built in 1826 by Samuel Hale Mann, who only practiced law there for four years before ill health forced him to sell it (and his house across the street) to Edward Mellen, who eventually became chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas in Worcester. The office housed many other offices and businesses over the years, all the while remaining in the possession of the Mellen family. In 1971, it was donated to the town and is maintained by the Wayland Historical Society.
In the nineteenth century, Lydia E. Pinkham started a company which produced a popular patent medicine named for its creator. It was an herbal-alcoholic tonic, or “Vegetable Compound,” created to relieve menstrual and menopausal discomfort. Her daughter, Aroline Chase Pinkham Gove, a supporter of what is now the North Shore Children’s Hospital, also established a baby clinic, in honor of her mother, in 1922. The Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial, designed by the Boston architectural firm of Haven and Hoyt, is a distinctive Colonial Revival building at the intersection of New Derby Street and Hawthorne Boulevard in Salem.