Built next to its earlier neighbor, the Unity Church in Easton, Massachusetts, the church parsonage stands as an architectural companion building of a similar style and materials to create a special composition. For the parsonage, the Ames Family hired Boston architects, William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt, who designed this residence in an early interpretation of the Queen Anne style, with asymmetrical form, steeply pitched roofs, decorative bays and ornate porches with turned posts. Completed in 1878, the Parsonage was the last gift to the town by Oliver Ames Jr., who died in 1877, and funded the church and lived nearby at his mansion, Unity Close. The Unity Church Parsonage remains in a great state of preservation by the congregation.
Located across the street from the iconic Oakes Ames Memorial Hall and the Ames Free Library, the North Easton Savings Bank and Post Office building perfectly compliments the Richardsonian Romanesque enclave found in the village, but it was not designed by the renowned architect whom the style is named after. The building was constructed in 1904 from plans by the firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, a Boston-based firm that grew out of Henry Hobson Richardson’s practice after his death in 1886. For this building, which served as a bank and local post office, the firm employed many of the hallmarks of the Richardsonian Romanesque style, just in a refined, less elaborate style. The building has walls of rough-faced granite ashlar blocks with brownstone trim and engaged columns. The three-bay front façade contains the centered entrance, recessed within a wide brownstone arch in the signature Richardsonian manner. The bank moved out of the building in the 1960s, and the building has served as professional offices ever-since, and is a contributing resource in the iconic enclave of buildings in North Easton.
Not far from and predating the North Easton Grammar School, the Oliver Ames High School in Easton, Massachusetts, is one of many civic buildings gifted to the community by members of the Ames Family. In 1893, Oliver Ames (1831-1895), a grandson of the Ames Shovel Works founder Oliver Ames, and son of Oakes Ames, offered to fund the construction of a new high school building if the town would pay the cost of digging its foundation and grading the site. They accepted. Oliver Ames hired Boston architect, Carl Fehmer, to design the school in Easton, after he had a positive experience with him as consulting architect to the Commonwealth for the extension to the Massachusetts State House years prior while serving as Governor. The refined Colonial Revival school building features a central pavilion with an entrance set within an ornate stone architrave with a Classical entablature with central pediment. The high school was outgrown and for years, became the town’s middle school until a consolidated school was built elsewhere. In the 1990s, the town sold the Oliver Ames High School to a developer, along with preservation restrictions, with the structure converted to apartments. A great example of adaptive reuse!
Located on Main Street in Easton, Massachusetts, this stately Italianate style mansion stands as a reminder of the wealth and status of the Ames Family in the 19th and 20th centuries. The residence was built in 1864 for Oliver Ames Jr. (1807-1877), who along with his brother, entered into the family business of Oliver Ames & Sons, shovel manufacturers. It was a prosperous time to be in the shovel business, as the nation was experiencing a dramatic expansion of canals, railroads, and other major infrastructure, all of which were built by men swinging shovels. From this, Oliver Ames also served as president of Union Pacific Railroad while the railroad was busy building the First transcontinental railroad in North America, making him an immense fortune. For his residence in his hometown, Oliver Ames hired the Boston architect, George Snell, to design this mansion, which was called Unity Close by its owner. Square in plan, the residence features a symmetrical facade, elaborate window hoods, bracketed cornice, and a hipped roof capped by a belvedere.
One of the most architecturally significant library buildings in the United States, the Ames Free Library in the small town of Easton, Massachusetts, is a landmark example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style designed by its namesake, Henry Hobson Richardson. The library in the village of North Easton was funded as part of the will of Oliver Ames Jr., who left $50,000 for the construction of a library for his native town. The request was carried out by Ames’ children, Frederick Lothrop Ames and Helen Angier Ames, who hired Henry Hobson Richardson to design the new structure. Richardson had recently completed the Trinity Church in Boston and was designing a library in Woburn at the time the Ames Family first commissioned him to put Easton on the map. Richardson would later design four other buildings in Easton for members of the Ames Family, including the Oakes Ames Memorial Building next door to the library. The Ames family also contracted architect Stanford White for the fireplace in the reading room and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens for the decorative medallions of the library’s benefactor. Construction started on the library in 1878 and it was completed in 1879, but the library did not open until 1883, possibly due to cost overruns. Essentially rectangular in plan, the Ames Library features three main masses: a longitudinal block; a stair tower with a pyramidal roof; and larger gable entry projection. The library is built of ashlar granite blocks and brownstone trim, which frames the openings. Over fifty years after the library was completed, the 1931 children’s wing was added onto the rear. The gift of Fanny Holt Ames, the addition was designed by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge, who continued Richardson’s architectural firm upon his death in 1886. The addition of brick showcases how materiality and certain design changes can effectively showcase the evolution of a building without detracting from its original design and integrity.
Located in the bucolic town of Princeton, Massachusetts, Goodnow Farm sits at the heart of a landscape that has been farmed for more than two and a half centuries. The farm and road take their name from the Goodnow family who owned the land here for well over 100 years. The farmhouse, which dates to around 1786, was built for Edward Goodnow (1742-1798) and his wife Lois, who married in 1770. Edward was a corporal during the Revolution, serving both at the Lexington alarm on April 19, 1775, and at Dorchester Heights in 1776, before settling in Princeton to spend his remaining years on the farm. The property was inherited by his son, Edward and later by his son, William B. Goodnow (1815-1904), the brother of Edward Augustus Goodnow, a merchant who made his fortune in Worcester and donated the Town Hall and Library to his birthplace. After nearly 150 years of Goodnow family ownership, in 1917 the old farm was sold to industrialist, Charles T. Crocker, Jr. of Fitchburg and became a gentleman’s farm. Crocker used the farm as a summer retreat from the city and hired staff to maintain the working farm aesthetic, though Charles Crocker did not actually do much or any of the agricultural laboring himself. Investing in the old farm to maintain the rural charm, Crocker added a large cow barn and attached dairy and the estate managed livestock and orchards. After the death of his father, in 1956, Mr. Crocker’s son, Charles T. Crocker, III, gave the main part of the farm, in two parcels totaling 636 acres, to the Massachusetts Audubon Society, to be preserved in perpetuity as a wildlife sanctuary. He made an additional gift of 118 acres in 1963. Over the subsequent decades, other parcels were acquired and the site has been operated as the Wachusett Meadow Wildlife Sanctuary, covering roughly 1,100 acres of the oldest farmland in Princeton, with twelve miles of public walking trails and historic stone walls. The site preserves what early Princeton was known for, at a simpler time when families depended on their own gardens, orchards, livestock and labor.
Susan Minns (1839-1938), one of the first women to graduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a trained biologist and collector, and benefactor to many scientific and environmental causes in her home state, purchased four acres of farmland in Princeton, Massachusetts in 1910 to build her country house. Ms. Minns lived on Louisburg Square in Beacon Hill, but would ultimately fall in love with living near nature in Central Massachusetts and established Princeton as her year-round residence. Built in 1912, Minns’ house is said to have been inspired by her many travels to England and was designed after an old publishing house she saw there. The long and low “cottage” of stone and wood has always been covered at its roof with red asphalt shingles. While in Princeton, Susan spend much of her inheritance to acquire large amounts of land in town, including two farms and 140 acres around Little Wachusett Mountain, a picturesque drumlin covered in forest. In 1926, Miss Minns donated the entirety of Little Wachusett to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as a wildlife sanctuary, which for 100 years, has been managed by the State as the Minns Wildlife Sanctuary. Susan Minns’ legacy lives on, not only in the form of her rustic Princeton home, but for her generosity and foresight to preserve important open space for the benefit of all.
When the town of Princeton was incorporated, vast land holdings were acquired, sold, and subdivided into large farmsteads for families moving westward from Boston. Part of the land in present-day Princeton was owned by William Brattle of Cambridge, but was undeveloped and confiscated by the Government as Brattle was a Loyalist, and sold in 1781. The property was purchased by David Osgood and later inherited by his son, Houghton Osgood (1768-1844), who built this farmhouse around 1794. The farmhouse and surrounding property with small pond, remained in the Osgood family until the mid 20th century.
Near the side of Mount Wachusett in Princeton, Massachusetts, Fernside has seen nearly two centuries of changing use but has maintained its significance all the while. This house was originally built in 1835 by Captain Benjamin Livermore Harrington (1774-1851) as a late example of a Federal style farmhouse with a symmetrical, five-bay facade and center entrance. Local resident, Wilkes Roper, bought the house in 1870 as the town of Princeton became desirable as a summer retreat, offering visitors cool mountain breezes and sweeping views of central Massachusetts. Mr. Roper added the side wings and opened the house as the Summer House Hotel, primarily renting rooms to Harvard professors and students. By 1890, the building had become the Vacation House for Working Girls. Renamed Fernside, the property became a resort for working women who could not otherwise have afforded a vacation. A week’s stay would have cost these ladies $4 in 1900. Guests arrived by train and were met by the Fernside carriage, which brought them and their luggage to the property. While staying here, the girls hiked the mountain, enjoyed fresh vegetables from the garden, and spent evenings in the library with charades, musicals, theatricals and dancing. Fernside’s final summer as a vacation house was 1988. Today, the property is home to Fernside at McLean, a rehabilitation center operated by McLean Hospital.
Once painted and now slowly returning to its former glory, the Joel Howe House on Merriam Road is an example of a typical middle-class residence of the early 19th century in the community of Princeton. Joel Howe (1797-1864) was formerly a resident of Holden and came to Princeton to marry Lydia Merriam, who’s family had lived in the town since 1788. Joel worked as a blacksmith and reportedly maintained his blacksmith shop in the house and barn built in 1822 and still standing nearby. The family would move to West Boylston and Joel would sell the property to a colleague, fellow blacksmith, Benjamin F. Muzzy (1828-1887). In the late 19th century, the old brick residence was owned by Dr. Charles Edward Parker a notable physician in town. In the 20th century, the house was painted, but is slowly being worn off by time, giving the house a sort of vitiligo effect.
Jutting into Buzzards Bay in Marion, Massachusetts, Great Hill is significant not only as the highest point in town but it is also home to one of the grandest estates in New England. Before the present mansion and various outbuildings were constructed here in the early 20th century, the property was home to Marion House, a sprawling 1860s resort hotel that drew hundreds of summer guests every year. In the early 1900s, Boston financier and Hayden, Stone & Co. co-founder, Galen L. Stone (1862-1926) bought the entire 312-acre peninsula and had the old hotel torn down. In its place, Stone commissioned this massive Tudor-style stone mansion with a central Great Hall built from stone quarried in Pennsylvania and shaped on-site by dozens of stonecutters. The estate was designed by architect, Horace Frazer of the firm, Chapman & Frazer, and it takes strong design elements from the country estates in the English countryside. Inside, the spaces are finished largely in oak with the grounds dotted with formal gardens, greenhouses, by landscape architects, Shurcliff & Shurcliff. The castle-like Main House, was greatly reduced from its original size in the 1950s to make the residence more manageable for later descendants, but even over one hundred years later, it remains one of the most impressive English Revival country houses in the United States, and the property’s grounds are open on weekdays for walking and cycling on paved roads.
One of the grandest homes overlooking Hammetts Cove and Sippican Harbor in Marion, Massachusetts, the Leonard-Mitton Estate showcases the status of the coastal community as a premier summer colony for wealthy Boston families going back over 100 years. The estate was built around 1900 for Charles Webster Leonard (1844-1941) of Boston and later New York, who without formal education, became the owner of a number of mills and quarries throughout New England and was a director of several local banks and businesses. A renowned horseman, he owned a breeding farm in Lexington, Kentucky and a trotting track in Readville. He was married to Emelyn Thatcher Welch in Paris and together, they built and owned this house until 1916. The residence is a sprawling Colonial Revival style mansion clad in stucco and capped with a gambrel roof. Its form comprises of a 2 1/2-story main block with two-story wings extending at 30-degree angles from the sides to provide better views of the harbor. By 1916, the summer residence was sold to George W. Mitton (1869-1947), the eldest son of Edward J. Mitton and Sarah Wade, the second generation of a family of merchants who operated the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. Starting as a stock boy, George Mitton eventually became president of the company. He was trained in the business by his father, Edward J. Mitton, the Jordan Marsh president, and Eben D. Jordan, the company’s founder. George Mitton was credited with growing the company into New England’s largest department store and introducing innovations such as executive training programs and employee benefits. George Mitton and his wife, spent summers at their Marion “cottage” until George’s death, but the property remained under the ownership of the family until the 1970s. The expansive waterfront property was recently renovated and sold, preserving this grand estate for another century.
The Austin Cottage and Moon Gate on Water Street in Marion, Massachusetts, are iconic landmarks in the community that showcase the architectural history of this coastal community. The Queen Anne style “cottage” was designed by Boston architect and Marion summer resident, William Gibbons Preston, for Judge James Walker Austin (1829-1895) in 1885. Early in his professional career, James W. Austin left Boston for the Hawaiian Islands, where he was recruited by King Kamehameha as a legal advisor and went on to serve as district attorney. He was elected a member of the Hawaiian parliament three times and was later appointed as judge in the Hawaiian Supreme Court and eventually became chief justice there before moving back to Boston in the 1870s. Judge Austin and his family summered at this cottage, known as “Edgewater” until his death, but the property remained in the Austin Family with final ownership held by the couple’s daughter Edith Austin (1873-1957). According to local lore, the moon gate was built for Edith around 1922 as an entrance to her extensive gardens. Edith is said to have been inspired by photographs of moon gates shared by her friend June Butler, who had married Parker Converse, who also summered in Marion, following their honeymoon in China. Local stones were used to construct the circular gate and the elements on the cornice of the gate were obtained from China. In Chinese culture moon gates are thought to offer an auspicious welcome or fortune to those who pass through with the ducks that adorn the top apparently symbolizing wealth and marital bliss. The garden has since been subdivided from the Austin estate, which was damaged in the 1938 New England Hurricane but both remain preserved today.
One of the most interesting houses in Marion, Massachusetts, is the Frederick Cutler Cottage, at the corner of Water and Lewis streets which was split in the 1970s to create two homes. The Cutler Cottage was originally built around 1903 for Frederick Barker Cutler (1861-1946), partner in the firm of Stetson, Cutler & Company in Boston, a building materials company who sold everything from long lumber and shingles to lime. For his summer cottage in Marion, Cutler hired noted Boston architect Herbert Langford Warren, founding principal of Warren, Smith & Biscoe, to furnish plans for the Arts and Crafts style dwelling of shingles, stone and brick. In the 1970s, the owner separated the house into two detached dwellings and moved them to separate lots. Both parts of the Cutler Cottage have since been renovated and further expanded, but retain much of their original qualities.
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