#88 William Gile House, 80 Osgood St., N. Andover

North Andover half-house meant to grow, but never did

A look at the framing of a colonial center entrance farm house often reveals that one side of the house was built before the other, that the original house looked like this house, a half-house.

A half-house was usually just the beginning. As the family grew, as fortunes improved, the matching side of the house was added. But some, like the William Giles House, above, never grew. You can see where the rest of the house would have been added, to the right, but it never was.

William Gile, a mason, had this house built about 1838, on Osgood Street in North Andover. The popular style at the time was Greek Revival, here seen in the doorway - in the design of the sidelights and in the pilasters with all their column parts: base, shaft, capital and entablature, and finally the cornice which becomes a roof over the front door. similar door ways can been seen at 179 Andover Street and 83 Academy Road. No one is certain if the carpenter of those houses, Thomas Russell, built this one too. Perhaps someone just copied.

The doorway is Greek Revival, but the house is built on Georgian lines, the accepted way to built since the early 1700's. The chimney is the only part of the traditional design which has been changed. It would ordinarily dominate the roof, rising above the ridge, serving a fireplace in each room. Here the chimney is small, a chimney for a stove, and it moved to the back of the house.

I haven't seen the framing here. Perhaps the central chimney was there originally. I suspect, however, that because William Giles was a mason he would have know about the latest heating systems. Inside his old-fashioned house he would have put the newest thing, an up-to-date cast iron stove.

#75 Hartcourt - Campion Hall, Cochichewick Drive, N. Andover

North Andover's Hardtcourt once a Jesuit retreat house

Hardtcourt, or Campion Hall, the house pictured here, shows how hard it is to capture buildings with a photograph. Buildings are lived in, experienced inside and out, over days and years. A photograph shows one view from one moment in time.

This photograph shows the approach to the house across a broad field, the dignified facade with its elaborate German Baroque covered entry. The character of the mansion can only be glimpsed in the brick and limestone detailing, the dominant roof with its three foot overhang and exposed framing.
If you drive down the road to the left and then around the end of the house you will see how it sits on the brow of the hill and opens to the view over Lake Cochichewick with a conservatory on the east and a veranda all along its south side. You can see how the veranda steps down gracefully to the lawn and how the six second floor bay windows extend through the roof to become dormers with roofs flared to match the main roof. You can also enjoy how the red of the brick is repeated in the deep red paint of the wood bays and how the pale mortar matches the limestone. It is a very handsome house.

George E. Kunhardt, a Lawrence woolen mill owner, asked his friend, Stephen Codman, a Boston architect, to build this house in 1906. After Mr. Kunhardt's death the house and its land were sold to the Jesuits who used it, as Campion Hall, for a retreat center. This photograph was taken when the estate was subdivided for housing in 1974. On the estate were also barns and staff housing which are now privately owned.

#66 22 Marblehead St., N. Andover

Ornate details make this standard house a jewel

The details on this house are fun to look at!
The boards above the bay window not only end in points, but the triangles are accentuated with dots and the cutouts above the decorative ribbon.

The house itself is a standard 19th century box with its gable turned toward the street, entrance on the side, with one front room and windows balanced above - the design one expects to find on a narrow urban lot. A skilled craftsman probably lived here: Marblehead Street is a short walk from the mills along the Merrimack. But on this ordinary shape, the builder nailed a marvelous melding of details from the popular styles of the Victorian era.

Start with the frieze at the bay window. It looks like lace. Its style is Eastlake, after Charles Eastlake who wrote books extolling this kind of decoration for furniture. Americans moved his designs from the inside to the outside of their houses.
The triangles are repeated on the shingles on the edge of the second story band, but the vertical boards above come from the Stick Style, a style which showed the frame of the house on the outside. The horizontal banding that continues around the sides of the house is typical Stick Style as are the panels below the windows (not visible here).
The corner boards have a piece at the edge carved to imitate rope, a detail often labeled Italianate.
The small hip roof over the gable was meant to suggest thatched roofs on English cottages or those of Swiss chalets.
That emphasis at the eaves, the hip of the roof combined with the verge board curving down to rest on two sets of brackets give a sheltering feeling to the roof, the sense of a cottage, not a city dwelling.
This house was not copied from a pattern book, but designed by the people who were to live here and the builder, assembling the pieces they liked to create their own style.

This self-confidence expressed in construction is one of the pleasures of Victorian houses.

#52 Carney's Stable, 117 Osgood St., North Andover

Carney left his mark with a magnificent carriage house

Turn onto Osgood Street at the North Common and immediately you will see this carriage house. And its mansion, which surely must be magnificent to deserve such an elaborate out-building? Where is it? Gone, without even a photograph remaining.

The carriage house was built about 1908 by Michael Carney, a successful liquor dealer from Lawrence. He bought the corner, its house and barns and about 60 additional acres when its owner, Josiah Crosby, successful at groceries but unsuccessful at real estate, sold 'Elm Vale' - his name for the property - at auction in 1885.

A carriage house is what its name implies: storage for carriages and tack, stalls for horses, a second floor for hay and living quarters for the horse men, a specialized barn. And what high style has been lavished upon this barn! The long line of the roof and the massive facade are broken by the middle section which sits out over the barn doors. The distinct sections are outlined with elaborate columns and strong returns at the eaves, as well as the horizontal band below the overhang. The Palladian window - named after the Italian, Palladio, who popularized the pattern of one arched window flanked by smaller side lights - would be acceptable in a church with its columns and brackets, its glass patterns. Just as acceptable would be that oval gable vent with its oversized keystones. Even the barn door bracing is ornamental, patterned into overlapping stars.
No wonder the corner was called Carney's Corner, and the carriage house, Carney's Stable.

#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.

#29 430 Pleasant St., North Andover

North Andover farm house is older than Stevens Pond

This North Andover farmhouse was built before Stevens Pond existed. In fact, one of its stone wall boundaries is now under water.
The building sits on the land facing south toward the sun, on a rise catching the summer breeze, with its back to the cold.
It was built about 1805, reportedly for the coachman of M.T. Stevens. The house can be dated by the small evenly spaced windows,and the simple story-and-a- half shape with no ornamentation. The two story wing on the left is a mid-20th century addition. The glassed-in front porch was added around World War I.
I've photographed this house to show how it appeared in the 1800's, instead of showing you the front door.
In 1848, Simon Flanders sold the house with about 4 acres of land for $46 to Cato Freeman, a black man. Other black families lived in Andover, but we know about Cato Freeman because he left a record. His houses are recorded on both the 1830 and the 1852 town maps. ( The 1830 house no longer exists.)
There are references to him in memoirs of other citizens as well as his own writing. He was educated and respected member of the town. Born a slave, he was freed by the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780. He lived with the Phillips family, who owned his parents, until he was 21. Mr. Freeman was a farmer. A permit issued to him in 1802 to pasture his cows on the Common, providing they caused no damage, still exists.
Mr. Freeman died at age 85 in 1853, leaving an estate of almost $1,000. His property was sold by his children and grandchildren to the Herberts.

Note: Charles Eastlake's opinion of Victorian taste as voiced in his Hints on Household Taste, quoted in Sunday Drive #28, should have read: "capicious and subject to constant variation".

#14 Jacob Rea House, 44 Rea St., N. Andover

The Jacob Rea House gives a glimpse of Valley's history

Two hundred sixty years of local history are visible at the Jacob Rea farm on Rea Street in North Andover. Originally part of a land grant from the King of England to the Engels brothers, the first house was built here in 1739. The east wing of the present house (not visible in the photograph) is probably part of that original house. The main house, shown here, was constructed around 1760. Note that the center chimney of earlier times has been divided into two chimneys, each serving two large rooms on the first and second floor.

This spacious farmhouse is sheltered by a hill behind it and overlooks outbuildings to the south. There are two front doors, on the easterly and southerly sides of the building. Dr. Foster, an early owner of the farmhouse, modernized it in the 1850's by adding the Italianate touches. Small multi-paned windows were replaced by larger ones with few panes. First floor windows extended toward the floor. Brackets were added around the windows, as was a curved front door, and the veranda - complete with posts decorated with tracery - on the east and south sides of the house. Adding Italianate details to New England houses was the fashionable thing to do in the mid-19th century. Rumor has it that the cost of remodeling the house caused Dr. Foster to go bankrupt. The Rea family, for whom the house is now known, apparently purchased the farm from a bank. They also owned other farms closer to the Salem Turnpike (Rte 114).

Until 1958, the farm was the only house on Rea Street. If you drive there you will see that the street goes right through their farm yard. The Reas still own the land, where side-by-side one may find excavating equipment and farm machinery.

#10 - John Wiley House, 93 Elm St., N. Andover, 1864

Factory owner built grand house away from town's Old Center

John Adams Wiley, who built this house, was a carriage maker who became president of Davis and Furber Machine Co. Made a partner in 1855, he was able to build his mansion by 1864 due to the economic boom of the Civil War.

It was the first grand house built outside the Old Center in North Andover, and was considered the most fashionable, built at Machine Shop Village among factory housing. From the flat board siding, grooved to imitate stone, to the finial (the cast iron bauble) on the top of the cupola, this was the latest style. The curve in the mansard roof is repeated on the oculus (circular window), the scalloped slate shingles and the mouldings. The arched windows of the tower are complimented by the reverse curve of the tower's roof, and the circular drive and curved stone fence complete the picture.

This is a Mansard Victorian, named for the roof which slopes steeply to allow for a full attic. The design originated in France under the reign of Napoleon III, so this style has also been called Second French Empire. Built of wood, this house was painted a dark color to suggest stone. The details of the horizontal banding at the foundation and second floor are cut to resemble stone, as are the porch railings and posts. The color unifies the house with the roof, making the whole a solid and stable master of its land.

Mr. Wiley's design worked with his site. Although the house faces Elm Street - with large windows on all sides because he was not concerned with the expense of heating large rooms with high ceilings - the working entrance (and barn, now gone) is on the protected, sunny south side of the house. Mr. Wiley also set his house above his factory, and from his tower - his bellvedere - he could look out over the mills and the Merrimack Valley.

If I were to write about this house today, I would talk about the influence of Samuel Sloan, a very popular American architect when this house was built, and about how this house has classic detailing while many others of the era use medieval 'romantic' forms.

#59 - 19 Johnson St. Firehouse, N. Andover, 1851

North Andover Firehouse is Greek Revival-style design

The current exhibit at the North Andover Historical Society details the development of the Common in the Old Center by the North Andover Improvement Society. One picture shows the firehouse, which once stood across from the North Parish Church. The Improvement Society moved the firehouse to Johnson Street in order to extend the Common to Andover Street.

The Johnson Street site is now the home of the Cochichewick Lodge, A.F.& A.M. so this seemed a simple story of how an outdated firehouse became a Masonic Temple. But when I checked with Robert Hull of the Lodge and John McQuire, who knows the history of the North Andover Fire Department, the take grew more complicated.

The station had been built in 1851, when Captain Stevens donated $800 with the stipulation that the firehouse not be moved more than a 1/4 mile from the site. Built by Jacob Chickering, it was a generous size, housing the pumpers and providing meeting space on the second floor. The horses who pulled the pumpers were brought to the firehouse by neighbors when the bells rang in the church and mill towers.
The men in this photograph have names familiar in North Andover history: Dale, Spofford, Farnum, and Stevens. Warren Stevens stand to the right, with a cane and tall hat, his hand on his hip.

(important line missing here - jgr) The lot, bought for $35., was beside the Brick Store, just over a quarter of a mile away. The extra distance was overlooked, and in 1882, the firehouse was relocated. There it stood, fire station for the Old Center, for 23 more years. What happened next must be saved for the next column.

(and the next column seems to be missing too. Sorry, I'll fix it! jgr)

Dustin Pollard House, 30 Salem St., N. Andover, c1847

North Andover home was built by a blacksmith in mid-19th century

Dustin Pollard, a black smith, bought the 30 Salem Street, North Andover, property from Nathaniel Stevens for $400 in 1847. He built this house and a shop behind it.

The style of the house (like a cape, but with the roof sitting on short second floor walls instead of meeting with the first floor ceiling) allowed more bedroom space in the attic and gave more room on the front facade of the house for decoration.
Here that means a recessed front door with pediment and columns, hoods shaped like pediments above the windows, and richly detailed columns on the corners with a frieze board at the roof line. All of these details recall Greek temples, labeling this house a Greek Revival cottage.
More fashionable houses would also have been turned on end, in order to build a Greek pediment in the gable facing the street. (see the Farnham School in this series.)

This practical house faces its roof north and south for winter wind and storm protection, and does not sit square to the street but angles to the sun. The small narrow chimneys indicate the house was heated by stoves. There are a number of similar well-built cottages in North Andover and the Merrimack Valley, indicating the comfortable standard of living a skilled craftsman could obtain in the 1840's and '50's.

#2 - Farnham District School, Rte 114, N. Andover, 1851

Greek Revival style added classic, democratic touch to buildings

Greek Revival style, one room school house, built in 1851 by the Town of Andover to replace an earlier building.
Photograph from the Andover Historical Society Collection

Notice the two front doors: the right one was for girls, the left one for boys. The windows are large to provide light since there was no electricity. And the small, single flue chimney served the pot belly stove that gave heat from the front of the room. The school faces south, down the Turnpike with its 'back' to the cold north, a common way to place a building when land was plentiful and heating inefficient.

In the early 1800's, Americans looked for new ways to express their pride in their new democracy through their buildings. Ancient Greek city states such as Athens embodied these ideals, so American builders copied Greek temples. They turned their buildings so that the ends faced the street and then added mouldings and trim to copy the marble columns and pediment of a Greek temple. By about 1830 almost everyone finished buildings, public and private with some Greek Revival detail. The builders of the Farnham (
or Farnum) School added mouldings to the corners, windows and doors. They built a wide roof overhang and added a frieze board just under the roof, simple details to remind us of Greek temples and our democracy.

This is the second column. My editor, Mary Fitzgerald, and I hadn't figured out the format yet, and I wanted to begin by describing basic architectural styles and terms. I think this column fairly boring, but it received much favorable comment over the years.

#85 - Parson Barnard House, Osgood Street, North Andover, 1715

Historic parson’s home illustrates transition from medieval design

The Rev. Thomas Barnard, pastor of the North Parish church in Andover, from 1697 to 1718, built this house in 1715. A scholar would say that Parson Barnard’s house shows the transition in colonial architecture styles from medieval to academic. What this means is that the details added to the basic structure – the hoods over the windows and the pediments over the door – were copied from older buildings, here those of the Italian Renaissance. And that the builders were influences by the theories of learned architects such as Palladio. Indeed, this house feels organized and planned as earlier homes do not. Earlier Medieval houses were utilitarian. Doors were for going in and out, windows for light and air. The inhabitants were anonymous. Here the windows and doors create the design. Their proportions and their placement in the wall give the house life. The moldings focus attention on themselves and the individual who uses them. You can easily imagine that someone inside opens the door and, stopping to feel the sunshine and enjoy the view, stands under the pediment. He is then bracketed on each side by the pilasters as if in a picture frame. The individual, of little importance in the medieval world, becomes the center of attention in the renaissance. And in this house we can see it happening.

For 200 years, people thought this to be the house of Ann Bradstreet, the poet who lived in Andover in the 1600s. Several old histories refer to this house on Osgood Street as her home, and the North Andover Historical Society, now the owner, still gets calls asking for tours of the ‘Bradstreet House”. It is open to visitors Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, from May to September, and by appointment.

(here is an interesting link to the floor plans, from a web site called Traditional New England Style Houseplans - ed)

(photo from North Andover Historical Society web site)

#68 - The Lodge, 723 Osgood Street, North Andover, 1886 (08/18/91)

Little house out of a fairy tale: Stevens gatehouse one of few in Valley

I have always felt this North Andover house was like a fairy take, a little stone cottage hinting of inviting cozy spaces within. Is it part of the stone wall that surrounds it? Did it just grow from that man-sized boulder at the entrance? Its front porch is like a cave. The roof is whimsical with its different curves and angles, the smaller dormer protruding. The stone chimney conveys the sense that somehow the roof just slipped down over the whole mass of rock.

This is the gatehouse to the Moses T. Stevens estate, now the Boston University Conference Center (the estate has since been bought by the Town of North Andover, in 1995 - ed). It was designed by Hartwell, Richardson, Architects, of Boston, in 1886. Few such gatehouses exist in the Merrimack Valley; while we had our share of Victorian millionaires, few of them built mansions on country acreage.

A gatehouse serves two somewhat contrary purposes. First, it stops nosy or unwanted callers and tradesmen from proceeding up the road to the main house. Secondly, it announces to the public that an estate of such stature as to require protection is indeed around the bend of the lane, which the gatehouse guards. In 1886 the architect was not worried about how to make efficient use of his materials, nor was he concerned about the cost to build, or heat, or light this gate-house. He was playing with shape and form, organic form. So this little house, of rough simple stone, with a roof which goes wherever it wants, and a seeming lack of order and symmetry, appearing to grow out of the ground, is really an abstract statement about what buildings might ideally be, as other worldly as a fairy tale.

(Drawing reproduction from St. Croix Architecture website - click on image for link)