#91 John R. Rollins School, Prospect Hill, Lawrence

Architect designed school especially for young children

When the Rollins School on Prospect Hill was built in 1892, James Cunningham, a retired sea captain, owned the land. He moved a house from the site so the school could be built.

George C. Adams was the architect. I like his work, so I regularly stop to see this school of brick with granite arches and lintels and copper panels. One day I was admiring the row of circles above the arch at the main door. Each circle is really 3, one cut inside the other, like a bull's eye. I realized the shape was one easily understood by a child. Then I saw that Mr. Adams had designed the building especially for children.
The Rollins School could have been intimidating. It is big and tall. But its sections are broken into manageable sizes by the separate hip roofs and the massing of the windows. The wings are simple rectangles and the places of emphasis - the clock and the entrance - are set off by half circles, all easy shapes for children.
The school sits high above Platt Street to the left, but the main entrance is up a gentle walk from Howard Street. The granite arch over the main door is massive, strong enough to carry the weight of the tower above. But its shape is simple, a half circle, and it is low. The arch sits - visually - on the granite which bands gteh school. At the entry porch, the banding is about 2 feet high, just right for a child to touch. A child who standing there is within the arch, not dwarfed by it.
The arch was built to a child's measure. From within the space a child can look out and see across the city and beyond. What a great symbol for a school: to protect while providing the vantage point for seeing the world.

#41 Clark House, 247 Main St., N. Andover

Clark House shows new style devised via US ingenuity

The files of the North Andover Historical Society report:
"In July of 1880, Francis G. Clark, a fancy goods store owner in Lawrence, made an agreement with Henry C. Couch, a Lawrence contractor, for the construction of a dwelling house in North Andover according to the plans of George C. Adams, an architect, also of Lawrence.The cost of the house was to be $3,475, excavating and grading by M.G. Smith of Lawrence, $250."

What they built is one of the best examples of the 'stick style' of Victorian architecture in the Valley. The name refers to the use of boards - sticks - to break up the wall surface. The decoration on the outside reflects the structure on the inside.

In earlier times, houses had been framed with posts and beams as barns are. But by 1880, we cut our lumber, 2x4's, 2x8's, etc. to form the walls and floors. The new method allowed much more flexible design. In the Clark House you see the change from simple square shapes: an angled corner tower, a recessed porch, dormers with pronounced eaves. While other Victorian syles used the flexible construction to copy European architecture, the stick style celebrated this new American technology, a stick-built house.

George Adams, the architect of this house, designed wonderful buildings all over New England. He liked to improvise upon the latest Victorian style, adding his variations. At the Clark House he reinforces the stick pattern with the porch railings and softens the angularity of the style with curves porch brackets and trim work in the gables. His iron cresting at the ridge distracts the eye from the massive size of the roof.

#3 - 30 High St., Methuen, 1879

Ornate house looks built for leisure

Few people know that there are French Second Empire Victorian homes in the heart of the Merrimack Valley. But just such a structure stands at 30 High Street, Methuen, a stone's throw away from the Red Tavern.

Victorian is a term loosely applied to houses built after the Civil War. French Second Empire refers exclusively to those copied from structures built in the French style during the reign of Napoleon III, 1852 -1870. Passersby first notice the Mansard roof, an idea imported from France - its steep slope allows a usable third floor while preserving the appearance on the outside of a two-story house. And the trim, large and massive, is applied to the outside of the house like decoration, with bands above the windows, brackets at the eaves, circular windows, and columns. The effect of weight and importance is softened by the addition of the delicate vertical boards at the porch and west bay eaves. And while the shape of the building seems at first to be rectangular, on every side the box has been broken. It is altered by the tower, the side bays and porches, and the projecting front bay even breaks through the roof line.

This house invites leisure. It speaks of owners climbing the tower to view the countryside, having tea on the side porch, sitting in the bays to the south or west in the winter sun and watching the neighborhood. The front entrance itself, large and gracious, is set three flights above the street, not a no-nonsense straight run. It is a place to see and be seen. The whole house is an extravagant use of space and material reminiscent of the voluminous use of cloth in the clothing of the time. It represents a very different life from the stark simplicity of the center entrance colonial of 1720, our previous Sunday Drive.

Note the line under the photograph: Built in 1879 by Samuel H. Harris, a Methuen druggist. Photo was taken in 1916.

The architect was George C. Adams, from Lawrence.