#43 133 Water St., Lawrence

Holt's ice house is an example of the Shingle Style in Lawrence

Louis Holt built this house about 1900. he began work at the Lawrence Ice Company about 1885 as a bookkeeper and boarded with Lewis Holt, treasurer of the company at 340 Water St. When he built this house he had advanced to the position of cashier. By 1915, he had become the president of the company and moved to North Andover. The ice house was located across Water St. on the Merrimack River.
House for the ice cutters, migrant workers from Quebec, was built to the east and north of Mr. Holt's house. The tenements are still there on Holt St. The ice house is gone.
Mr. Holt built the house in the Shingle Style. Although it is now covered with siding that resembles clapboard, the house as originally sheathed in shingles. The individual pieces of wood could easily shed the water on a sloped wall and curve around a little eyebrow window peeking through the roof. The shingles, wrapping around the bay, the dormers, and the hip roof, made the surface feel continuous.
The gambrel roof, large and sheltering, stained a dark brown, adds to the sense of enclosure. The stone porch is a counterpoint to all that mass, a typical accent to a Shingle Style house. The masonry emphasized each individual stone, playing with the surface as much as the shingles played with the wall.
Houses like this were often built at the beach, hunkering down in the sand before the vastness of the ocean.