#98 174-6 Andover Street, Ballardvale, Andover

This home was once half of the depot for Ballardvale train stop

At 174-6 Andover St., Ballardvale, is a two story house with fancy double Italianate windows facing the street. The hood over the windows on the first floor is flat with brackets on each side. The second floor windows are arched within an elaborate arch with springing blocks at its beginning and a key stone at its top.The roof overhang extends so far to the sides and front that it needs brackets for support.

Why was this house built here amidst mill housing?

It wasn't. This house was once half of the depot for the Ballardvale stop on the Boston and Maine Railroad.

The photograph shows the station as it sat on the west side of the tracks. This end, probably the right end, was moved to Andover Street in the 1870's. The remaining half served as the depot until the 1950's when it was torn down.

The first railroad line through Andover was built in 1836 to the east of Ballardvale. Its railroad bed is still visible running through Rec Park and Spring Grove Cemetery on Abbot Street.
When the Shawsheen River was dammed at Ballardvale for water power, and the mills built, the tracks were relocated to their present location to the west of the river.

The station was built in 1848 in the style of the day, Italianate. The shape and details of provincial farm houses built of stone were adapted for an American railroad station built of wood.
The elaborate windows announce that this is an important building. The overhang originally meant to protect farmers and crops, here is extended so that it shelters passengers and baggage.

#97 1088 West Lowell St., Haverhill

A friend, describing the way houses changed from colonial days to the Victorian era, explained that they grew higher and higher, in feeling as well as reality. Drive up West Lowell Street in Haverhill to Scotland Hill and see.

This Italianate farm house sits on a knoll looking down the road. We, passing by, look up at it. Then its detailing makes it feel even higher. A curve at the top of the gable window, draws the eye up to the peak of the roof. Or see how the slender shape of the bay window, made by its four narrow windows is continued in the two long double windows just above it. From there one's eye goes to the skinny paired brackets and dentils in the eaves, and again to the roof.

Note how the brackets are bunched at the eaves' returns to act as mock Corinthian capitals to the slender pilasters on the corners of the house - a wonderful detail that reinforces the height of the house.

To the north, across W. Lowell Street, is a Georgian brick-end farm house probably built about 1800. Although it too is at the top of Scotland Hill, it sits solidly surrounded by its fields, a nice contrast to this house, built about 50 years later, so decidedly sited above its land.

Not much is recorded about this house. A local historian told me of the Polish and Armenian families who farmed here at the turn of the century. The 1851 Haverhill map lists "Dr. Merrill" next to the dot marking this house. Other houses on W. Lowell Street are associated with Ayre's Village, so perhaps this house is too.

#94 - 13 Milton Street, Lawrence

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.

#90 Sarah H. Harding House, 6-8 Harding Street, Andover

Harding House is fine, local example of Greek Revival architecture

The style of this house, built in 1846, is Greek Revival. The flat board siding on the front is meant to look like the marble of Greek temples; the pediments over the windows like the roofs of those temples. The columns and entablature at the front doors mimic those of ancient Greece.

More than Greek Revival details dates the house to the 1840's. The technology of the time is also evident. Large windows speak of readily available, inexpensive glass. The height of the transoms over the front doors tells us the first floor has high ceilings. Houses built 100 years earlier had ceilings low enough to touch; these are at least nine feet tall. New Englanders had discovered that one way to cool a house in the summer was to have high ceilings and let the heat rise. Franklin and cast iron stoves had been invented, so rooms like these could be efficiently heated in winter.

I had always liked this house at 6-8 Harding Street. It is sited to face south, looking out across the hill toward town. Those large windows let in lots of light and give the house a sense of graciousness. I didn't expect to find it had so much history to go with it. The Harding family, for whom the street in named, owned land here and a partnership in the paper mill on the Shawsheen River. This double house was built for Sarah H. Harding in 1846, on land she bought from her mother. Sarah, a single woman, sold one side of the house to Hannah Barker, a widow. No longer was a woman alone expected to attach herself to a relative's household. She could be independent with her own property.

#89 Corporate Houses, Canal & Amesbury Sts. Lawrence

Architects to tour Lawrence to see buildings in classic mill city
On Tuesday, June 23, the American Institute of Architects will sponsor a tour of Lawrence and Lowell in conjunction with their annual conference which this year is held in Boston.

I asked them how they knew to come to Boston. The tour planner reminded me that Lawrence is in the history books as the classic mill city. Its plan is clear and orderly: the river the mills, the canals, the boarding houses, and then the retail thoroughfare and the common with its civic buildings. and most of it is still here to see.

The Great Stone Dam built by The Essex Company still holds back the Merrimack to divert its water into the canals. The guard locks and gate house are still in operation. The factories are here, anchored by the Ayer Mill clock tower, as is Essex Street and the North Common.

Two of the boarding houses for the millworkers remain. One is now the Heritage State Park Museum at Canal and Jackson Streets. The other is on the corner of Canal and Amesbury Streets, the right end of the 'corporation houses' in the picture above.

This is one of the first buildings in the city, designed in 1848 by Charles Storrow. Its Georgian proportions are updated with Greek Revival details - large windows and fancy brick work along the eave line.

What a wonderful sweep of buildings these were along the tree lined road, overlooking the water, a compliment to any city in the world. Today's visitors must imagine the rest of the boarding houses from the one piece remaining, but the trees, small though they are, have been replanted.

If you would like to go on the AIA tour, contact Alexandra Lee of the Boston Society of Architects.

#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.

#84 274 Salem Street, Lawrence

Irish immigrants built home on Salem Street around 1857
In the 1840's, The Essex Company , the corporation that had built the Great Dam, leased its land on the south bank of the Merrimack River to its employees so they could build shanties. The family who built at 18 Dover Street ( as Salem St. was then called) were Michael and Mary Donovan and their children from Skibereen, Ireland. Their sons helped built the dam and worked in the mills. In 1856 Michael Donovan paid The Essex Co. $186. for this lot. He built this house, which was valued in the 1860 census at $800.

What he built is a house similar to those his neighbors were building up and down the street. Today standing on Salem Street, one can still pick out those early houses by their shapes - little boxes with their gables facing the street, steep roofs set on low second floor walls, the front door on one side, the windows balanced. The wide roof overhang is generous as are the frieze and corner boards. The effect is simple and pleasing. These houses lack the glamor of later Victorian buildings, but their proportions make them charming.

We know about 274 Salem Street because the Donovans' descendants still live here; and the because we can find them in The Essex Co. records and city directories now housed at the Immigrant City Archives. Seven generations of Donovans have been born here. Family members immigrating from Ireland stopped here first.
At one point a barn at the rear of the lot housed two horses. The bay window on the side with tis carved brackets was added in the 1880's, and the 1890 tornado that whipped through South Lawrence came right through the kitchen.

#81 Harmon House 86 Summer St., Haverhill

Haverhill house was stopover on Underground Railroad trail

David Harmon built this house on Summer Street in Haverhill about 1840. Its classic Greek Revival style, with the gable facing the street and the heavy banding on the corners and eaves, is intended to remind the viewer of a Greek temple.

The spacing of the columns on the surrounding porch repeats the proportions of the house. The columns themselves, tapered, round, and fluted, are a graceful counterpoint to the flat board siding on the first floor. The flat siding, meant to imitate stone, is repeated in the gable, emphasizing its triangular shape, reminiscent of a Greek pediment.

David Harmon manufactured soes, but by avocation he was a farmer. He experimented extensively with fruits and vegetables on the terraced land behind his home and built a greenhouse, visible here in the lower left of the photograph.

He was also an abolitionist. The noted men of his day, from John Greenleaf Whittier, born in Haverhill, to Fredrick Douglas and William Lloyd Garrison, visited here. His house was a stop on the Underground Railroad, transporting slaves to Canada and freedom.

Although the Underground Railroad was secret and illegal, people in Haverhill seem to have known that this was one of the stops, because there are records of this house being stoned by mobs. (later note: There are also records of fugitives openly knocking on the front door to ask
for shelter and transportation north.)

Since this picture was taken, about 1870, the house has been extensively remodeled, including the addition of a tower and an elaborate back entry.

#96 Newsholme House 156 Lowell St., Methuen

Newsholme house showed off the suburban side of Methuen

In 1903, Methuen printed a 'Pictorial Bulletin' for its Old Home Week Celebration. Its purpose was "To show something of Methuen, one of the Most Attractive Suburban Towns". Included in it was this picture of the residence of Alfred Newsholme.

Most of the turn-of-the-century homes shown in the booklet are stylish late Victorians. Compared to them, this house is plain indeed, hardly changed since its construction in the 1850's. A story and a half farm house, it has very simple mouldings. In the photograph, the curve of the frieze board at the eaves and the hoods over the windows and doors seem tentative. But seen on site, the details add up to an effective, graceful facade, fitting for the straight forward shape and relationship of the house, ell, and barn.

In mid-19th century fashion, the house faces the street. But note that the north wall - the left side on the photo - has only one window, protecting the house from the cold winds from the north.
The lattice work to the right probably carried an awning for protection from the summer sun. This was a working farm, a barn with a hatch for hay over the door, and a lower level for implements and perhaps cows. It was possibly a truck farm, providing vegetables to growing Methuen and Lawrence .
When this picture was taken in 1903, Mr. Newsholme had been water commissioner for Methuen for nine years. In 1916, the house was sold to the Gammons family who lived here until 1985. Howard Gammons, a carpenter, extended the house, while his wife kept extensive flower gardens, some of which are still there today.
Soon after this picture was taken, Ashland Avenue was laid out to the left of the stone pier and the farm land became a subdivision.

#53 125 Arlington St., Haverhill

100 year old Haverhill house has classic Shingle Style design

The Highlands of Haverhill is a neighborhood of marvelous houses. This house at 125 Arlington Street, is understated and small, compared to its neighbors, but well worth looking at.

When it was built in 1891, the Shingle Style - the extensive use of shingles to sheath walls and roof - was fashionable. Many architects simply added pieces of this style to a basic house, a shingled turret, a bowed window, a curved dormer, to please the homeowner. The architect of this house, however, understood the idea behind the Shingle Style: shingles, because they are nailed in place little piece by little piece, can cover a curved surface as a flat board - a clapboard, for example - cannot.
This house IS a curved surface, a round tower. And the design is so simple, the lines so smooth, that without its Victorian brackets, its small paned windows, it would look decidedly modern.
Everything reinforces the tower. The stone porch below supports it, heavy enough visually to carry the mass of the tower. The small windows hardly break the surface of the curve; the larger ones are set in a bay attached to the outside. The roof, a cone ending in a finial(not visible here) completes the shape. The wings and wooden porch give human scale. Without them the tower would be quite austere and forbidding.

The owner, Enoch Howes, was one of the partners of Woodman and Howes, shoe manufacturers. He moved from a classic Carpenter Gothic cottage in the center of town to the classic Shingle Style home in the Highlands.
The Haverhill Historical Society has portraits of him in his youth and later as a patriarch.

#44 256 Haverhill St., Methuen

Date of Methuen farmhouse uncertain, but its grace is certain

Stop at the light at Lowell and Haverhill Streets in Methuen and admire the house across the road at 256 Haverhill St. The land at the intersection sets off the house and allows it to be seen much as it must have appeared in the 1850's, a simple Greek Revival farmhouse with Italianate details.

The written records for the house are sketchy. Oral history says it, along with the house on the corner of Haverhill and Forest Streets, and the farm across from it on Lowell Street, were built by the same carpenter. Certainly the Greek Revival details of this house can been seen in the others: the gable turned to the street, the wide roof overhang, its return at the eaves to create the capital for the columns on the corners of the house, the hoods over the windows and the arched window in the attic.

Here the porch has light, graceful Italianate arches with drops, little turned balls, at the center points. These are repeated on the ends of the brackets carrying the roof overhang.

The house has been owned by Vincent and Douglas Cox since 1941. Their grandfather, Patrick Cox reportedly bought the house and its farmland in 1850. But there is no record of the house on the 1846 map of Methuen. The house has a cut granite foundation and post and beam framing which could indicate construction about 1830. Italianate details weren't fashionable until the 1850's. Did Patrick Cox add the brackets and arches after the bought the house?

So when was it built? It doesn't really matter. The house itself, especially with its new coat of paint, has grace enough.

Note: This column was published in August, 1990. A few years later the house was torn down to make way for a new subdivision.

#31 430 Pelham St.,Methuen

Methuen's town farm shows typical Greek Revival design

Out at the end of Pelham Street in Methuen is a substantial brick house with arched doorways and granite lintels. Across from it on a hill rises a brick apartment house.
What are they doing way out in the country? The brick house is Methuen's town farm, built about 1850, and the apartments were the town infirmary.
Town farms were popular throughout New England. They provided shelter for the homeless. some residents could pay for their keep.Others worked the farm to provide for themselves. Some were elderly or infirm.
There had been an earlier town farm before the Pelham Street location, but when the boundary line was drawn to create Lawrence and Methuen, the original town farm landed in the new city of Lawrence.
So a new town farm was needed. This house was available. Other houses in the Merrimack Valley were built about the same time and have gables that rise square above the roof on the ends between twin chimneys. But none that I know of has the arched doors and the play of windows (with their differing sizes and placement) that makes this house delightful instead of heavy and massive. I always enjoy driving past it.
The maple tree in front of the house is one of a pair, both as old as the house.

Note: Since I wrote this, I have found out that the house was originally built for a wealthy family. Its front entrance has a lovely, ornate, late Federal details, hardly visible in the picture.
Perhaps the Methuen Historical Society or the current owners know more of its history.

#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".

#22 - 1 Jackson St., Lawrence

This was model housing - in 1850

In 1850 these brick tenements beside the North Canal were considered an excellent example of worker housing.

The Sanitary Survey of Lawrence, commissioned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, allocated five pages to floor plans, rules of conduct for boarders, and the up-to-date sanitary system of the four model boarding houses of the Bay State Mills.

The buildings were simple brick town houses, attached side to side, having rearyards with sheds along the alley. Three stories high, 20 rooms large, with dormers in the attic, they were designed to house 36 boarders. These were mainly women, who lived two and four to a room.

The tenements' architecture was traditional: the rhythm of the doors and windows following the pattern established in Georgian England and carried to the United States before 1700. The only concessions to the desires of the day for more decoration were columns at the doors, the brick returns at the eaves, and the wonderful delicate brick patterning along the roof line. With cut granite lintels and foundations, these straight forward, confident buildings were erected "not for an investment... but as a means of preserving a proper supervision over the operatives employed and for their benefit."

These boarding houses became a model duplicated by mill owners all over New England. Today the units at 1 Jackson Street can be visited as the Visitors Center for the Lawrence Heritage State Park. Appropriately, the current show at the Center is an exhibition by the Smithsonian Institute called "New uses, Old Places, Remaking America" that highlights the rescue and reuse of buildings all over America, including some in the Merrimack Valley.

#18 - Hidden-Chandler House,17 Hidden Road, Andover (7/30/89)

Andover house is example of both Federal and Colonial Revival design

When Lucy Nesmith bought this house in 1897 she wished to improve it.

What she remodeled was a house built in about 1812 by David Hidden for his father-in-law, Issac Chandler, in the Federal style popular after the American Revolution. The Hidden family had lived in the house since 1816, and had been active in the town. Mary Hidden, David's daughter, an Abbot Academy graduate known for her culture and intelligence, had provided boarding for many locally famous people. She died in 1893, and when her brother, David Hidden, died in 1896, the house was sold to Lucy Nesmith.

The nostalgia at the turn of the century for colonial America inspired builders to recreate colonial homes and Mrs. Nesmith followed the style. She rebuilt the back wing and added the porch and sunroom with its deck and railings (to the left of the picture). But while the forms she used - columns and the pediment over the entrance - were inspired by the grander homes of colonial times, the spaces are strictly 1900 in style. Actual colonial homes did not have porches: people were either in the house or out in the yard. Nor did they need sunrooms. So Mrs. Nesmith's piazza and sunroom speak of leisure unknown in early New England.

The sleeping porch on the end of the second floor is a post World War I addition, when sleeping in the fresh air was considered healthful, a far cry from the dreaded 'night vapors' of colonial times. The piazza is now gone, but the 'improved' Colonial Revival front door and sun room can still be seen.

When I wrote this I called the 1900 improvements "Neo-Colonial". Today the usual name is "Colonial Revival". Today we understand that the influences are as much the classic forms championed by Thomas Jefferson as the colonial forms of Newburyport and Portsmouth.

#19 - 193 Salem St., South Lawrence

Touch of Italy in the Valley

In the late 1850's the popular style for houses was Italianate. The pattern books from England at the time showed picturesque homes with steep roofs and wide eaves, a design adapted from rural Italian buildings, not the classical monuments of Rome.

American carpenters copied these details to dress up American houses, and this house is the result. It is a house designed for a narrow lot - one room wide with an entry hall and staircase to one side. All over the Valley there are houses like this, their size dependent on the size of the lot. Their character depends on the Italianate details added by the carpenter: a bay with paired windows accenting the front room is complimented by the heavy brackets supporting the roof over the front door. The gable end facing the street is detailed with flat boarding and brackets under the generous roof overhang.

This Italianate house, located on the corner of Salem and Carver Streets, boasts two story bay windows on each street and elaborate hoods over the shuttered windows. Owned by the Manahan family from about 1867 to the 1930's, it may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad that escaping slaves used to get to Canada - this possibility is suggested by a hidden stairway to an attic room.

Note in the photograph the tree-guards to keep horses from eating the trees, and wagon wheels from bumping them, and the stone post at the front door to anchor a horse's reins.

#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)

#38 - Barker Homestead, Woodland St., Methuen, c1830

Barker Homestead an eclectic blending of North and South

The Barkers, one of Methuen's original families, lived at the corner of Haverhill and Woodland Streets; in about 1830, a Barker who had gone to seek his fortune in Tennessee sent home enough money to build a house. So the old farm house was moved, and on its site was built this copy of a southern mansion.

In the South, a wrap-around porch keeps the house cool by shading it from the heat of the sun - and here is the porch with its handsome columns. But in the Merrimack Valley, the sun is welcome, so the porch roof is high and shallow, cutting out only the midsummer heat. Similarly, long windows let in cool breezes in the South, but can be cold and drafty in New England winters. So while first floor windows reach the floor, they are protected by shutters.

And although the details of the house - the entrance, the Doric columns and frieze board above - classify it as Greek Revival, there is much here that cannot be easily labeled. Whoever built this house freely adapted traditional elements - there aren't just a few dormers, but rows of them, and four triangular windows in the gable end. And the railing above the porch, playing on the shape of the steep roof and the dormers, almost becomes gingerbread fretwork.

So here are my questions: Had this builder ever seen a real Southern Mansion? Does that steep roof come from Tidewater Virginia? And what would this wonderful house look like if the Barker in Tennessee had been able to send back a photograph?

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.