Gothic Revival house reflects 1850's style, taste
Come around the corner on Milton Street and for a moment you can imagine yourself in Lawrence in 1850. This house, built for a prosperous farmer, would have been surrounded by fields, orchards, and woods. Its yard would have been clean, as it is now, without foundation plantings.
Today, even though the city surrounds it, because of the lot across the way - overgrown with trees - and the park below on Bodwell Street, and especially because of how the house was sited on the brow of the hill, the house looks out over a landscape very similar to that it surveyed when it was built.
Gothic Revival, the style of this house, was the style recommended for 'rural cottages' by Andrew Jackson Downing, a popular architect and horticulturist of the time. The books he wrote circulated widely. Local carpenters copied his verandas, arched and circular windows, and steep roofs. They also copied the verge boards - the panels running up the roof's edge - and the decorative columns. But the particular patterns or scrolls and flowers on those boards were their 0wn invention.
The veranda and its brackets -the scrolls that curve along the porch roof -were meant to frame the picturesque view across Merrimack River in an arch, like a picture frame. Probably there was a similar roof with its supports and brackets at the top of the tower.
'Gothic' in the early 1800's meant 'medieval'. The first people to build in the Gothic Revival style meant to imitate the carved stone work on medieval castles and cathedrals. When the houses were built of wood instead of stone, the details changed to fit the nature of the material. 'Gingerbread' - the scroll work - became not a copy of stone tracery, but an art form in its own right.
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