#99 55 East Haverhill St., Lawrence

A city house good enough for a fairy tale

Look at all that Victorian gingerbread! all that fretwork in the gables labels the house as Stick Style.

The name comes from the pieces - sticks of wood - used to decorate the house. The horizontal banding below the windows and the same detail used to create the frieze band at the eaves are typical details of the Stick Style, as is the cross bracing under the windows. The house is built from 'sticks' - wooden studs set side by side and braced. The trim is seen as an outward show of that framing pattern.

This doesn't look like classic Greek or Roman architecture. The arches on the porch and the frieze band are the only pieces borrowed directly from that vocabulary. However, the house maintains the classic order of base (bottom), middle and top. The frieze, the banding, and the porch are also all so defined.

This house was built about 1875 by W.H.P. Wright, a counselor ( at law? city?) with offices on Essex St. Later the Church of St. Laurence O'Toole, which was on the corner of East Haverhill St. used the house first as a rectory and then as a novitiate. In 1987, Merrimack College opened its Urban Institute here. The house is now a center for seminars, classes,, and a home for student interns in urban studies. It is the focus of the college's programs for Lawrence High School students and its collaboration with the Frost Elementary School.

#95 - Gale Hill, Lawrence

written for Labor Day, 1992

Gale Hill home reflects care, pride taken in its construction

This is Gale Hill in Lawrence. Or rather this photograph, taken about 1890, shows a house being moved so that Gale Hill can be cut down. Margin Street ran at the bottom of Gale Hill, which was about where Gale Street is today.

As Lawrence grew, the hill - mostly sand, as can be seen in the foreground of the photograph - was removed to fill in low places around town and to become the sand in the filter beds of the Lawrence sanitary system.
We think the hill was named after John Gale and his son, John P. Gale, carriage makers on Lowell Street who lived on Greenwood Street . Their company was lost in a fire in 1867, and they did not rebuild.

Look at the labor that went into moving this house. Men placed all that cribbing by hand to support that ramp which is at least 120 feet long. There were no machines to help build the ramp or move the house to its new location. All the work was done by men and animals.

The house was about 20 years old, no longer fashionable with its mansard roof. Yet it was moved. Why? Partly I think because it was built by hand, like the ramp. A saw mill had cut trees into lumber to frame the house, but each piece of lumber was cut to length on the job by a man with a hand saw.

There were no power nailers or drills or table saws, nothing run by a motor. There was no gypsum wall board. Each strip of lath had to be nailed in place to the inside walls before the plaster was smoothed on in overlapping coats. There were no asphalt shingles - that roof had slate tiles, each with two hand punched holes for the nails which held it on.

The men who moved the house understood the time and material and talent it takes to build a house. So they thought it reasonable to labor mightily to move one.

note: Readers told me I had the name wrong. As I remember today, I wrote 'Gage' when I should have written 'Gale'. I think... The name may still be wrong. The Lawrence historians will know.

#92 Nevins Memorial Library Carriage Sheds

Nevins Library carriage sheds call to mind High Victorian era


The carriage sheds behind the Nevins Memorial Library in Methuen are unusual just because they are still there.

Once in a while behind a country church you will see some garages for the horse and buggy which brought the farmer's family to town. But in towns like Methuen, when cars became common, the land where the sheds stood was needed for other purposes.

Most carriage sheds were built around 1800 in the Georgian style. These Methuen ones are unusual because they were built in 1884, in high Victorian style. They are handsome in proportion and ornament - tall enough for a spirited horse, arched to cover a carriage. The posts are turned, the arches beveled, matching those of the library. The boards which partition the stalls have circular cut-outs and scalloped tops. Originally the end walls were covered with scalloped slate shingles, some of which remain on the north end.

When the Nevins family donated the land, hired the architect and gave the money to build the library, they also had the grounds landscaped. The trees and sculpture were carefully placed as were the carriage sheds for town residents coming to browse among the books or attend festivities in the Hall.

Broadway in those days was dirt - it wasn't paved until 1926. Most people avoided the hill altogether and used the gentler grade of Hampshire Street. They drove right past the Nevins family home, the land where Methuen's municipal offices are today. David Nevins, born in Methuen, was an importer in New York City before he returned home. His fortune came from The Methuen Cotton Co., his mill on the Spicket, which made world famous, heavy duty cotton and jute cloth.

#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.

#73 7 Foster Circle, Andover, c. 1860

French designers had impact on Andover Victorian house

Back in the early 1940's, this house could have been the haunted house of Halloween stories. It was empty and in disrepair, the shutters crooked, the window panes cracked.
Dust and cobwebs were everywhere and the trellis work cast eerie shadows over everything.

The house was originally the home of Moses Foster, cashier for the Andover National Bank. Probably just after the Civil War, he built it on land now bound by Elm Street, Whittier Street, and Foster Circle in Andover.

The main entrance and the tower were the latest style from France - a Mansard roof with iron cresting, substantial columns and mouldings. Aside from the tower though, this house was a conservative design, a variation on the houses New Englanders had been building for 150 years. It looks like a series of boxes set beside one another with steep roofs and balanced windows. The paired brackets under the eaves and the flat board siding on the left wing were details that had been familiar with Andover builders for at least 30 years.

Moses Foster's son, Edward, lived here until his death in 1936. Then the house stood empty for years.

When Fred Cheever laid out Foster Circle along with Johnson Acres across Elm Street in the early 1940's, he demolished most of the house. The right wing was moved to a new foundation at 7 Foster Circle. The paired brackets and the gable window with its keystone at the top of the arch - visible in the photographs - are still there. The double arched windows were saved and reused in the garage.

#72 106 Summer St., Haverhill

Haverhill's 1890 Gale House typifies High Victorian style

Haverhill residents know this house. I didn't. So they sent me off to find it. I'm glad they did.

Look at all that stuff!
Three porches, each with a different style of railing, stained glass windows on both floors, elaborate dormers, and carvings on the carvings. Pattern everywhere - much of it freely adapted from European architecture: the stained glass and carved stone work are 14th c. Gothic; the first floor window framing and the chimney corbelling are 16th c. English Tudor; the arched front entry is 12th c. French Romanesque. The arch above it on the second floor is copied from Moorish castles in 11th c. Spain. That arch is one of the nicest Moorish - sometimes called Turkish - arches in the Valley!

A.W. Vinal was the architect. He designed many row houses in the Back Bay of Boston. And this house has the feeling of a row house allowed to expand, freed from a narrow lot.

John E. Gale, the owner, was a shoe manufacturer, then director of the Haverhill National Bank, a city alderman, active in many organizations. When he died in 1916, the newspaper stated that he had lived a life "without ostentation". This house, which he built in 1890, makes that statement surprising - certainly this house asks to be looked at - until you have seen its neighborhood, The Highlands, where every corner is the site for another remarkable Victorian mansion. This was the style, expected.

#70 150 Garden St., Lawrence

C.T. Emerson designed houses which show a distinctive touch of class

In the 1860's, C.T. Emerson called himself a carpenter in the Lawrence City Directory. By 1871, he listed his profession as 'architect' with an Essex Street address. By 1875, he had built this house on the corner of Garden and Newbury Streets as his own residence.

The corner lot allowed him space to build an imposing house with double bays. The style, Second French Empire, with its distinctive Mansard roof, was the latest import from Paris. The quoins on the corners of the main house, the heavy mouldings, all copies of stone work, make the house weighty and important - worthy of that solid granite foundation.

Mr. Emerson had a fine sense of design - see all those curves on the window hoods, and the airy touch of the roof railing where the house meets the sky. There probably was a fine view of the growing city of Lawrence from that roof. Note the elegant detail of the iron fence on the granite retaining wall and how the granite curves at the steps.

Maintaining his architectural offices on Essex Street, Mr. Emerson lived here through the 1890's.

The growth of Lawrence can be seen in this photograph: the Federal two-family house on the left was built before 1840. The Italianate house to the right was built about 1855. Both are now gone. Today when you look, you will see that Mr. Emerson's house has lost its Mansard roof and the elaborate facade is covered with white siding. Many houses in the Valley were similarly covered when Victorian architecture was no longer in fashion and its maintenance became too time consuming. Today that splendid ornamentation is often hidden from us.

#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.

#65 St. Mary's Church, Haverhill St., Lawrence

St. Mary's recalls 12th-century Gothic cathedrals of Europe

Anyone who has built a tower with a child's blocks knows that eventually the blocks topple.

So why don't the granite block walls of St. Mary's Church in Lawrence tumble down? Because St. Mary's is built in the manner of the 12th century Gothic cathedrals in Europe, with pointed arches. Each side of these arches leans against the other side. Together they hold each other up, becoming the frame for the church. The space in the outside walls between the arches becomes windows, filled with stained glass. The space inside below the vaulting - the arches that carry the roof - becomes the sanctuary.

The point where the arch starts curving is the 'springing point', and because it carries the pressure of the stones above it, needs support. The stone buttresses - those stone ribs between the windows and at the corners that stick out - are that support. Each stone column, or buttress, pushes against an arch and keep it stable.
Even the little towers on the buttresses - which you can see to the left on the front of the church - add weight to help keep the arches in place.

Look for St. Mary's as you cross the Merrimack into Lawrence. It sits in honor on the hill above the city, as do the Gothic cathedrals in Europe, like Chartres and Cologne. Built because the parish had outgrown the Church of the Immaculate Conception, it was started in 1866 and dedicated, to the boom of cannons, in June, 1871.

Its cross, now newly restored along with its steeple, rises 235 feet above the ground.

Stop and go in. You will see the stained glass windows from the inside and the magnificent space created by those granite blocks leaning against one another.

#57 Grey Court Gate House, Methuen

Gate house was summer home for Methuen hat manufacturer

Methuen's Grey Court Gate House was first a farmhouse built in 1840 by William Whittier.

In 1880, Charles Tenney, who had been born on a farm in Salem, NH, bought the house and 30 acres of land. At the time he manufactured hats in a factory on the banks of the Spicket River near the Methuen falls. When he began exporting hats to Europe, Mr. Tenney relocated the company to New York City.

While Grey Court Castle was being built, the gate house served as his summer home. His additions include the tower, terra cota chimney and Victorian window sashes. The tower was particularly stylish with its roof, a double curve called an ogee. The curve is carefully repeated at the joining of tower and house, a feat requiring great skill in order to frame graceful curves with rectangular timbers.

Soon afterward, this building became the gate house to Grey Court. In that pre-telephone era, people regularly sent notes to each other and went calling. Much as today people have unlisted telephone numbers and answering machines, people then had servants to announce that they were not at home, even if they were, or had gate houses to keep the unwelcome off their property.

Today the Grey Court Gate House guards a park owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Grey Court was destroyed by fire in 1977. A local Methuen group, the Tenney Gate House Restoration Committee, hopes to restore the Gate House so it may serve as the Methuen Historical Museum and Archives. Although the house is substantial, well built of granite block, the roof is leaking and the gate house needs structural repair to make it habitable again.

#55 18-20 Ellis St., S. Lawrence

Lawrence carpenter built Queen Anne rental house

The builder of this house, John C. Griffin, lived on Durham Street, right around the corner from the Queen Anne style house shown in the above photo. A carpenter by profession, he must have walked the street many times before he built this two-family rental at the top of the rise, with a view down Atkinson Street, a wonderful end to the road as you come up from the Wetherbee School.
He built what was, in the 1880's, a standard house, the shape popular on small urban lots since about 1840: two stories, front facing gable, one room wide with the entry and staircase to the side. Usually a bay window graced the front: here the bay extends to the second floor.
Mr. Griffin embellished this basic shape with 1880's Queen Anne details: paired brackets and dentil moulding, scalloped shingles shirting the second floor bay and at the peak of the gable, the corbels supporting the roof of the front porch, the curving roofs of the bay and the porch.
He understood that the house would be seen at close range by pedestrians, hence the delicate turning of the corners of the bay, the panels below the windows. He also knew how to balance the proportions so the house is pleasing from a distance.
The rhythms of the house, the windows' shapes in the bay, the massing of the bay against the facade, the two doors balanced by the window above, the scale of the gable to the house, are appealing.
Great care is being taken to repair and paint this house to let us see again its Victorian charm. On the sides its previous appearance is still visible.

#45 126-8 130-2 Main St. N., Andover

Victorian extravaganza seen in North Andover store fronts

On August 24, 1901, North Andover held a Firemens' Muster, an opportunity for the town to admire its fire equipment and the skill of its firemen. The downtown merchants added to the festivities by decorating their stores.
Here are the results: layers of bunting and flags, draped and tied, almost obscuring the buildings themselves. The building on the left houses John P. Murphy's Drug Store. On the right was the store of James W. Leitch, tinsmith and plumber, who also sold stoves and kitchen goods.
Both structures are basic boxes, adapted to the fashion of their times. The shapes are generous, broad and high, with lots of large windows. These were gracious flats for those who lived above the store. Both store fronts are recessed, welcoming the customer on the street by making a protected space, out of the sun or rain. The large plate glass windows, made possible by the latest technology, showed off the interior, and what was for sale, to the passer-by.
The builder of the drug store added his details to the front of the box: the corner tower, the second floor bay and the trim line (a 'belt course') above the third floor windows. The builder on the right cut into his shape. Not only did he recess the store front below the bay windows, he hollowed out a marvelous semi-circular balcony under the gable, creating quite private porch on a main street.
When you drive by, enjoy the combination of Victorian extravaganza, the fancy cut shingles and brackets at the eaves with the more sober Colonial Revival dentils and corner boards.

#42 Salem St. and Holt Rd., Andover

Window provided clue that revealed house's true identity

At the corner of Salem Street and Gray Road in Andover stands a two story house with delicate Greek Revival detailing. Even the triangular window in the attic is ornate. But its windows are not placed in a classic pattern to match the trim, except on the east end. The front doors seems an afterthought, facing neither south to the weather nor presenting a welcoming face to the street.

It is one of those houses I kept on my list of puzzles until this week when I decided to write about a Holt house in honor of the Holt family reunion this weekend.

Nicholas and Elizabeth Holt came to Andover from Newbury in 1644. They settled on Holt Hill and prospered. The Andover Historical Society has a list with photographs of Holt properties, so I went to take a look. When I saw that unusual fancy window in the gable of the Holt School, I knew I had solved the puzzle.

William Jenkins built the new Holt School, the one in the picture, in the summer of 1869 for $1,642. The newspaper called it an "ornament to that part of town".

The old Holt School was moved to West Andover near Shattuck Farm.

In 1900, when the town decided to close the Holt School on Salem St., and transport students to the center of town, the school was sold to become a private home. The new owners added another floor and windows. The front doors, one for girls and one for boys, were blocked, no longer needed. The gable window remained.
Today, when I see the house, I still see the school children around it and children playing as in a Winslow Homer painting.

#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.

#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.

# 37 182 Common St., Lawrence

This was a parking garage in city's horse-and-buggy era

Most of the buildings around Lawrence Common are quite elaborate, so you might wonder why 182 Common St. is so simple. And why has it only three floors when the building beside it, though the same height, has four.
This was a livery stable. It was here that you left your horse and carriage when you came into town, or rented a horse - and a carriage if you didn't own one - when you went out.
The first stable, on the right, was built about 1870. The left side was wood, then rebuilt of brick around 1900.
Horse are taller than people. So the ceilings had to be higher, and doors too, so there was only space for 3 floors.
Mills were built on a bay system, a length of building with a window centered on the space, repeated until the factory was long enough. Here the stable, framed like a mill, was only as many bays long as the lot allowed. This simple construction system is very handsome. The brick itself is attractive. The proportions and rhythms of the windows are appealing. Their granite sills and arched openings keep the facade from being so severe.
The granite band at the second floor line gives the building a base: the first floor. The simple corbels at the roof line define the top.
When trucks and cars replaced wagons and carriages, the livery stables became manufacturing spaces and stores.
In 1981, the current owners restored this building to its original appearance. It now houses law offices.

note: The drawing was made for "Around and Through the Common", a brochure produced jointly by Immigrant City Archives and Lawrence High School.

# 33 Circa 1870 castle overlooks mountains of Maine, N.H.

What should sit at the end of a dirt road, on the top of a hill, looking over a lake and off to the mountains of New Hampshire and Maine? A castle, of course!

Dr. James Nichols built the castle in 1873 after a stay in England. He named it 'Winnekenni', after the Algonquin word meaning "very beautiful". This was his summer house, complimented by a boat house down by Lake Kenoza. A chemist and inventor, Dr. Nichols experimented with chemical fertilizer on his fields, below the castle.

Well aware of the endless supply of stone in New England farm land, he thought we should build with it, and he built his castle as an example. It has 4 foot thick foundations, 20 inch deep walls, quoins on the corners, crenelations at the roof, and arches over the windows.

Arches such as these are built over a wood form, and when the last stone - the 'key' stone at the top - is placed, the wood form can be removed. The wedge-shaped stone then locks the whole arch in place: gravity pulls the keystone down; its shape pushes out against the other stones, the wall keeps those stones from moving, and the whole arch stays up.

The Castle isn't really any style, but it borrows the shape of a medieval English fortress, including its battle stations. And an American summer residence is surely a Victorian gesture.

Winnekenni Castle became a part of the Haverhill park system in 1895. The inside was gutted by fire in 1967, and then rebuilt, so the Castle can be used. It is now administered by the Winnekenni Foundation.

#16 - 603 Haverhill St., Lawrence

Tower, woodwork beautify tenement











This is a tenement - a three story apartment house. But apartments are not what you think of when you approach the house at the top of the hill on Haverhill Street.

The first thing you notice is the tower with all its detail. And that is what the builders of Victorian architecture in the Queen Anne style wanted. They loved asymmetry - here there is not only a tower on one corner, but bay windows and a wrap around porch to catch your eye. Everywhere there is something to look at: the half round windows peeking through the roof, the porch columns with Ionic capitals, the foundation where the stones were not placed smoothly but turned to make a rough surface. The house is currently painted gray with brick red trim, but when it was built in the 1880's, it might have had as many as five different colors highlighting its trim.

It is unexpected to find a tenement in the fashionable Tower Hill neighborhood of Lawrence, so perhaps it was built for an extended family. Certainly its detail and size speak of time and money to build a gracious and fashionable home. Queen Anne builders loved to break up the flat surface of a wall with pattern - you find fancy cut shingles, clapboards and mouldings made into patterns, extra little roofs, and sun bursts. Usually the sun rays were at the top of the house, under gables, but here they are at the bottom, below the bay windows. The Queen Anne style was started in England by architects nostalgic over the craftsmanship of 150 years earlier, during the reign of Queen Anne ( 1702-1714). When the style was introduced in the United States at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 - and by pattern books showing the latest details - it was easily adapted and expanded upon by local carpenters to fit their own conditions. Queen Anne became a truly American style.

#20 - The Turnpike, Gaunt Square, Methuen

Methuen millionaire transformed 1820's building into imposing hotel

Edward F. Searles, Methuen's eccentric millionaire, loved to build and rebuild. About1900, he remodeled a good portion of Gaunt Square, turning this building into a hotel and calling it The Turnpike.
The turnpike had been cut north from Boston in the early 1800's. Its path was roughly along today's Route 28 except it crossed the Merrimack River at the Casey Bridge. From Broadway, Methuen, it continued on to Concord, NH and beyond.
Mr. Searles created his hotel in the image of an inn that might have served as a stage coach stop on the original turnpike. When he designed, he borrowed from whatever classic architectural forms he deemed appropriate. In this instance he used columns and pediments to transform a simple building into an imposing edifice. The original structure behind these additions is a square facade with regularly spaced windows probabaly dating from the 1820's. The Mansard, or curved, roof may have been added before the Civil War.
By adding the columns, triangular pediments over the windows and the cupola, Mr. Searles hid the 1800's facade. He stuccoed the building, attached a second bulding to the south side ( not visible in the photograph) and added the stone and wronght iron fence.
The new elements -the strong horizontal moulding line at the eaves and broad bands above the columns ( the entabulature) - dominate the building.

This picture was taken for the Methuen Bicentennial in 1926 when the main floor of the Turnpike, the ballroom, had become the Methuen First National Bank.
Today, the lower floors are offices and the upper ones apartments.

#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.