Buildings of New England

Murray A. Potter (1871-1915) and his wife, Bessie Lincoln Potter lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Murray worked as a Professor of Romance Languages at Harvard College. The couple spent summers in Lancaster, Massachusetts, where they would purchase a house in 1909 that was built just a decade or so earlier. The couple were said to be big fans of history and decided to make their house resemble the 1782 Pierce-Nichols House in Salem, having the brown shingle Victorian house “modernized” in the current three-story near-symmetrical form.