house history

Charles Hoitt House // 1895

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Charles William Hoitt (1847-1925) was born in Newmarket, New Hampshire, the son of William K. A. and Sarah C. (Swain) Hoitt. His father was a descendant of John Hoyt, one of the original settlers of Salisbury, Massachusetts. On the maternal side he is a descendant of Phineas Swain who served at Bunker Hill on the American side. Charles enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1867, and was graduated in the class of 1871. He moved to Nashua to work as Master of the Mt. Pleasant School and later worked as an usher at the Lincoln Grammar School in Boston. He eventually gave up teaching as a profession and returned to Nashua and worked at a local law office. He was admitted to the Hillsboro bar in 1877, and worked as a City Solicitor and later as Justice to the Nashua Police Court. With his standing, he erected this fine house on Concord Avenue, with a deep lot where he raised rare exotic birds. Judge Hoitt served in the New Hampshire House of Representatives in 1901 and in 1907, was appointed by Theodore Roosevelt to be the United States Attorney for the District of New Hampshire. His residence in Nashua blends Queen Anne, Shingle, and Colonial Revival styles elegantly. The property was purchased in the 1920s by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua as a parsonage, a use it held until it was sold in 1977 to a private homeowner. The shingled porch was removed during the time it was a parsonage, but the house remains in excellent condition today!

Hoar House // 1891

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This house in West Acton is the last in this batch of Queen Anne style Victorian houses I’ll feature in the village. The dwelling was built in 1891 for a 31-year-old John Sherman Hoar, Jr. (1860-1954) and his new wife Minnie R. Hart. John was a master carpenter and built many of the Queen Anne style homes on Windsor Street and later Colonial Revival and Craftsman homes in the 1890s and 1900s himself. This was his own property which once included a workshop where he cut and manufactured many homes on the street. Today, the Hoar House has a cheery pink color scheme (which while not historically appropriate) brought a smile to my face when strolling by!

Edgar Hall House // 1889

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Another of Acton’s amazing old Queen Anne homes is the Edgar Hall House, an 1889 gem on Windsor Avenue. The house was built for Edgar Henry Hall and his wife Angelina who raised their daughter, Alice, in the home. Edgar and his brother inherited the family business from their father, Enoch Hall, and they produced wooden pails, tubs, clothing racks, and other wooden goods. The company employed over 30 workers in the early 20th century until it closed during the Great Depression. Edgar retired and relaxed from this stunning Victorian home until his death in 1954.

George and Effie Mead House // 1911

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Prominently sited upon a hill on a dead-end street in West Acton, Massachusetts, this Craftsman Bungalow is a very elaborate and well-preserved example of the style. The house was built in 1911 for George Varnum Mead (1861-1940) and his wife Effie Wright Mead (1860-1926) as their summer home when they weren’t living in Somerville. Mr. Mead was born in West Acton to Varnum Balfour Mead, who operated the A. O. W. Mead Company, a produce marketing business in Acton and Boston. Varnum’s brother built an elaborate Second Empire style mansion in town which was featured on here yesterday. George Mead followed his father’s footsteps and worked in the family business, which was in operation starting in the 1840s. The A. O. W. Mead Company gathered produce from farmers all over West Acton, kept the produce in cold storage facilities erected by the family, and sent it to Boston for sale at Quincy Market until George’s death in 1940. The Craftsman style house has a fieldstone base, low, overhanging flared gable roof, and is sheathed in shingle siding. Characteristic features include the multiple dormers, exposed rafter tails, grouped windows, and the large fieldstone chimney.

Enoch Fuller Octagon // c.1850

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Oh the Octagon! The very rare Octagon house was a unique house style briefly popular in the 1850s in the United States and Canada. The style can generally be traced to the influence of one man, amateur architect and phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler. In his book, The Octagon House: A Home for All of 1848 (and reprinted with more photos in 1853), Fowler advocated for the shape’s benefits for buildings in that the octagon allowed for additional living space, received more natural light, was easier to heat, and remained cooler in the summer. These benefits all derive from the geometry of an octagon: the shape encloses space efficiently, minimizing external surface area and consequently heat loss and gain, building costs etc. Some were convinced and built Octagon houses, but the style and its brief period of popularity, died by the 1860s. This example in Stoneham, Massachusetts was built around 1850 for and by Enoch Fuller, a close personal friend of P. T. Barnum, founder of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Fuller visited Barnum’s octagonal home in Bridgeport, Connecticut and he decided to construct an octagon house in Stoneham. The home was owned by Col. Gerrry Trowbridge not long after completion. The home was built with a fireplace in every room, a spiral, “flying” staircase, and a sweeping veranda.

Barncastle // 1884

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Barncastle, located in the Town of Blue Hill, Maine, is an elaborate and distinctive house. Designed by George A. Clough and built in 1884, the building is a sprawling complex in the Shingle style with additional eccentric details. As Blue Hill and other coastal communities of Down East Maine saw popularity as summer colonies of wealthy city-dwellers flocking to the rugged coastline, many new residents either built new “cottages” or renovated older (often ancestral) homes. Effie Hinckley Ober (1843-1927) who was born in town, married Virgil P. Kline, personal attorney to John D. Rockefeller, and for thirty years worked as attorney for the Standard Oil Co. of Ohio. Effie founded the Boston Ideal Opera Company in 1879 and traveled with the group extensively, retiring in 1885, upon that time, she would move into Barncastle for summers (then named “Ideal Lodge” after her opera company). In 1884, before her retirement, Effie hired her childhood friend, architect George A. Clough, who was born in Blue Hill and worked in Boston, to completely redesign her ancestral home. Clough’s design engulfed a smaller Cape Cod-style house owned by Effie’s mother Mary Peters Hinckley Ober Atherton, a descendant of early Blue Hill settlers, creating an absolutely elegant Shingle-style summer cottage. The house is highly visible on a main street, but what many do not see is the arch-and-turret link between kitchen wing and carriage barn. “Barncastle” is now home to an elegant inn and restaurant!

Clough-Hinckley House // 1832

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This charming Federal style cape in Blue Hill Maine was built in 1832 by Moses P. Clough, a sea captain seemingly as a wedding gift to his new bride of that year, Sally Prince. He resided in the home off-and-on between excursions and trips at sea until his untimely death at sea in 1836 of bilious fever, possibly caused by malaria. After his death, his widow Sally, remarried and moved to Cherryfield, Maine. The old family home was sold to Bushrod W. Hinckley, an attorney who was involved in the town affairs. Today, the old Clough-Hinckley home is known as Arborvine, a great restaurant known for using local, farm-to-table ingredients. The home is excellently preserved by the owners, down to the leaded glass fanlight and sidelights at the entrance. Swoon!

The Dome Home // 2003

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This past weekend, I was lucky enough to stay at one of the most unique Airbnb’s in New England, the Dome Home in idyllic Kennebunkport, Maine! The house itself was hand-built in 2003 by trained architect and sculptor Daphne Pulsifer with her husband Daniel Bates, on 43-acres of forest just miles from the iconic Maine beaches. Inside, the house features numerous custom touches designed and built by the original owners, including light fixtures, floor tiling, hand-built oak doors, wall tiling, woodwork — much of it claimed from the property itself. The Dome Home is completely sustainable with solar panels providing all the power needed, making the property completely off-the-grid. The original owners sold the property in 2022 to the new owners who have lovingly updated the spaces, keeping the charm and unique qualities of the Dome. If you are ever in Kennebunkport and are looking for a unique, off-the-grid stay with all of the amenities of modern living, definitely check out the Dome!

Richard E. Edwards House // 1981

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The Colonial era has had a grip on New England residential design since the 1700s, with each subsequent “revival” showcasing the character-defining features in bold new ways. With this house on College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, the architect, Friedrich St. Florian, blended traditional Colonial Revival residential design with the flair and quirkiness that comes with the Post-Modern style, popular in the 1980s. The house is five bays wide at the facade with a central projecting bay at the entrance. Post-Modernism takes architectural precedence and turns it on its head, with quirky takes on features and larger proportions. The Edwards House exhibits decorative stone lintels, a Classically inspired entry with pilasters, and a very large cupola at the roof. What do you think of this house? I feel it works well for the neighborhood as it is contextual to the surrounding Colonial-era and Colonial Revival style residences while clearly being of the late 20th century.

Henry Samuel Sprague House // 1902

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Colonial Revival houses just exude New England charm! This house in Providence’s East Side/College Hill neighborhood was built at the turn of the 20th century in 1902 for Henry Samuel Sprague, a Providence grain dealer, for $15,000. Mr. Sprague clearly did well for himself financially as he could afford a house lot on one of the city’s most beloved streets, Prospect Street. The large mansion has many architectural details which stand out including contrasting brick and shingle on the first and second floors, a massive projecting portico covering a prominent entry, bold fluted pilasters at the center bay, and three pedimented dormers at the slate roof. Inside, this old house has some amazing woodwork and details too!