New Video: Amazing Story of Battle Road Houses of Lincoln

by Dan//Uncategorized


This video is about two historic houses that survive today (and several that are now lost) that witnessed the battles of Lexington and Concord, the start of the American Revolution, on April 19, 1775. They along the Battle Road at Minute National Historical Park in the town of Lincoln, Massachusetts. The surviving houses are the Hartwell Tavern and the Capt. William Smith House. The lost houses are the Samuel Hartwell House and homes that belonged to members of the Brooks and Nelson families.

Sargent House Museum (1782)

by Dan//Colonial, Gloucester, Houses

Sargent House Museum
Sargent House Museum

The Sargent House Museum is located at 49 Middle Street in Gloucester. Also known as the Sargent-Murray-Gilman-Hough House, the home was built in 1782 for Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), an author and early advocate for women’s rights, and her first husband, Capt. John Stevens, a merchant in the West Indies trade. Her second husband was John Murray, a founder of the Universalist Church in America. The museum has a collection of American furniture and art, including paintings by Sargent family descendant John Singer Sargent.

The Wayside (1717)

by Dan//Colonial, Concord, Houses, Victorian Eclectic

The Wayside in Concord (not to be confused with Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury) is a historic home (now part of Minute Man National Historic Park) that was the residence of several famous authors over the years. The oldest part of the house may date to as early as 1717. Minuteman Samuel Whitney, who owned two slaves, lived in the house at time of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. The first of the authors to live in the house was Louisa May Alcott, whose parents, Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott, owned it from 1845 to 1852. They named their home “Hillside” and made additions to the original saltbox structure (see image below). Many of Louisa’s experiences in the house were later incorporated in her famous book Little Women. The family would eventually move to Boston, but later in the 1850s would live back in Concord in nearby Orchard House. Nathaniel Hawthorne purchased the house from the Alcotts in 1852. Hawthorne renamed the house the Wayside and made his own additions to the building around 1860. He died in 1864 and his widow sold the house in 1870, but their daughter Rose and her husband, George P. Lathrop later owned it for a time, selling it in 1883 to Boston publisher Daniel Lothrop and his wife Harriett. Under the pen name Margaret Sidney, Harriett wrote The Five Little Peppers series of children’s books, published between 1881 and 1916. They added a large piazza to the west side of the house in 1887. The house was inherited in 1924 by their daughter, Margaret Mulford Lothrop (1884-1970), who worked to preserve the house and opened it for tours. Margaret also wrote a book about the house, The Wayside: Home of Authors (1940). In the 1960s, the house became the first literary site to be acquired by the National Park Service.
Continue reading “The Wayside (1717)”

Aaron Bray House (1869)

by Dan//Gloucester, Houses, Italianate

Dale Avenue in Gloucester was laid out in the 1860s. One of the first houses to be erected on the new street was 19 Dale Avenue, built between 1869 and 1872. The Italianate residence was originally the home of Aaron W. Bray, an agent for the New England Fish Company at Dodd’s Wharf on Duncan’s Point. Bray had died by 1890 and the house was then occupied through at least 1900 by Albert S. Maddocks, an apothecary with a shop on Main Street.

George Perkins House (1879)

by Dan//Gloucester, Houses, Stick Style

An example of Stick style architecture, the house at 50 Pleasant Street in Gloucester was built in 1879-1880 for George H. Perkins. He was head of George Perkins & Son, fish dealers, whose office was located at Perkins’ Wharf. Perkins later served as Vice President of the First National Bank from 1890 to 1900. The house is now subdivided into several condo units.

Continue reading “George Perkins House (1879)”

Staples-Hutton House (1805)

by Dan//Colonial Revival, Concord, Houses, Queen Anne

The house at 215 Lexington Road in Concord has undergone a great deal of change over the centuries. The origins of the house lie in a two-story building known as the Old Gun House that once stood on Bedford Street near the center of town. It was built c. 1805 to house the two brass cannons of the Concord Artillery, which had been authorized the previous year. Sometime in the 1860s, developer Samuel Staples (1813-1895) moved the building to the current property on Lexington Road. In the 1840s he had served as the town jailer and in 1846 had jailed Henry David Thoreau for a night for nonpayment of his poll tax. Staples remodeled the former armory as his residence and lived in it for about ten years. In 1883, Benjamin H. Hutton, or Huttman (?), of New York purchased the house for himself and his family and soon after acquired the house at 201 Lexington Road, where his brother-in-law would live for some years. Huttman hired architect John Chapman to expand remodel both homes in the Queen Anne style. The family later had financial troubles and the house was sold at auction about 1911-1912. It was bought by Philip Flavin, a dentist who converted the building into a double house.

Anderson Market (1828)

by Dan//Commercial, Concord, Federal

The Concord Historic Buildings Website is a project of the Concord Free Public Library. It focuses on several buildings in town, providing a detailed history of each with links to related primary sources, many of which are held in the library’s William Munroe Special Collections. One of the buildings featured on the website is the former Anderson Market at 42-44 Main Street (listed as 32 Main Street in MACRIS). The website provides a detailed history of the building across 29 web pages with numerous links to primary material. The structure is one of the earliest of many commercial buildings erected by the Mill Dam Company, which developed Concord’s downtown starting in 1826. The building was surveyed by Henry David Thoreau in 1853. It was occupied by various businesses in the nineteenth century, including a hatter’s shop, a watch shop, a milliner, and eventually a succession of grocery stores. Lars Anderson and his son Leslie bought the business in 1913, establishing Anderson’s Market. Leslie married Esther Wheeler in 1920 and their son, David “Andy” Anderson, would become the third generation to run the market. In 1930 the building‘s facade was remodeled by architect Harry Britton Little. The market remained in business until 1978. The building is now owned by the fourth generation of the family, David Anderson and his wife Karen, who operate Main Streets Market & Cafe.