#100 305 Essex Street, Lawrence

Old Eagle-Tribune office was built in Italianate Style

Four years ago the people at the Eagle-Tribune gave me a chance to write about architecture in the Merrimack Valley. They didn't know if there would be an audience, or if I could meet deadlines. Nevertheless, they let me try. This column, the 100th, is to thank them for their support and encouragement.

305 Essex Street, at the corner of Lawrence Street, was the offices of the newspapers The Daily Eagle, The Evening Tribune, and the weekly Essex Eagle in 1890. Today the building's brick is exposed, but originally, as seen in the photograph, the brick was stuccoed to resemble cut stone, like buildings you would see in Florence or Rome - in other words, Italianate.

This building was designed to be seen from the street. The cast iron columns on the first floor allow large glass windows so merchants might display their goods to passing shoppers. Those columns, which could be as plain as the concrete filled steel columns in many basements, have bases, edges and flowering capitals, a treat for the pedestrian.
The fire escape becomes part of the ornamentation with its crossed railings. The eaves, embellished with brackets and mouldings signal the top of the office block. There is a 4th floor, but it is invisible to the pedestrian.
As can be seen in the photograph, its dormers are simple, without the variety of pattern seen in the walls of the lower three floors. So the massive eave line becomes the top edge of the building.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#74 Lawrence Mills, south side of Merrimack River

Lawrence mills offer unique New England architecture

When I have guests new to the Merrimack Valley, I take them on a drive past Lawrence on Interstate 495. Most of I-495 cuts through rolling New England hills, past suburban developments, with exit signs indicating a town somewhere, over there. But here, where the interstate curves down around Lawrence to cross the Merrimack River, here is a city. From the river and its mills, to the water towers on the surrounding hills, the city is laid out for every traveler to see.

And the mills! There are so many of them! So many windows and brick walls in so many long boxes set one after another along the river, seemingly held in place by those tall smokestack cylinders.
Then, after all that severity, the Ayer Mill clock tower! How surprising is the elaborate shape, the arches, the clock, the double curves of the roof, the finial and weather vane - all that complexity above the simplicity of the mills.

The mills are straightforward: the necessary space for the industry generated by the water power of the river. Their simple bay pattern, a length of brick and a window repeated as many times as needed, adapted easily to changing methods of construction. The early mill walls are brick all the way through, with holes cut for windows. As glass became easier to manufacture and buildings easier to heat, the mill walls became glass, windows set within a structural frame, the brick only the skin over that frame. In the photograph that change can been seen from the older mill on the left to the newer one in the middle.
A note: If you intend to admire the view of the mills on the Merrimack from I-495, let someone else drive.

#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.

#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.

#56 5 Campo Seco Street, Lawrence

Murder, arson and concrete part of this house's legend

I saw this house before I heard the legend, and as you can see from the photograph the house is a surprise in itself. It is built in a grand manner with quoins on the corners, courses of blocks clearly indicated on the walls, oversized hoods above the windows, bas relief sculptured panels below. And that front porch with those columns and balconies!

The texture of the walls and handling of the columns is called "rustification". The style, the very height of sophistication in Renaissance England in 1630, was just the right thing to copy in 1911 in order to make a dramatic statement to the Lawrence community. Although startling here in gray concrete, the same details formed from wood and painted white look quite straightforward when seen on houses in Newburyport. The builder, Jack Katz, came from South America, planning to convince the Valley to build with concrete. This house was his showcase.

In 1916, the house burned: the loss was listed at $48,000, a tremendous amount for the time. Only the outside shell remained. Legend on Prospect Hill says Jack Katz set the fire himself trying to kill someone, maybe not Mrs. Aaron Currier and her daughter, Ella, who died in the blaze. The house stood empty for several years. Finally a new roof was added and the inside rebuilt.

The neighborhood children nicknamed this the "Tootsie Roll House" in the 1950's in honor of those columns.

#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.

#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.

#36 54-56 Osgood St., S. Lawrence

A house of symmetry, columns and dentil moulding in Lawrence

The 7th and 8th grade students at the Kane School are studying American history by learning about their own neighborhood. This house, just down the street from the school, is perfect for this. It shows the energy and confidence of the country and Lawrence, creating a new world, finding new ways.

This Colonial Revival house was built in 1900 for Jeremiah McCarthy, a liquor dealer. His renter at No. 54 was William Walsh, a librarian.

It is a wonderful house. There are so many details in this facade. Luckily they are anchored by the symmetry and the bulk of the main house. When it was built Americans had discovered their past and Colonial architecture. Here are colonial ideas of symmetry, columns with simple capitals and dentil moulding. (The simple little square blocks reminded someone of teeth, hence the name, dentils.)
But look how these colonial motifs are put together. The symmetrical front bay, attached to the center of the square house is more important visually than the house. The bay has angled windows on the first and second floors and then breaks through the roof line on the third to become a square gable with columns on the corners, and a triangle with a sunburst at the top. There are dentils everywhere and never just one column where there is space for two. Add the stained glass, the bay to the south, the varied windows, and the porches, and you have a house much more connected to exuberant Victorian life than the simple forms used at the time of the American Revolution.

# 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.

#30 - 290 Andover St., South Lawrence

South Lawrence house, once a tavern, dates to 18th century

This is a big house, a large room on each side of the front door, two rooms deep on both the first and second floor, the homestead of a prosperous farmer.It is the oldest house still standing in South Lawrence, built about 1760 by Joseph Parker, tavern keeper and member of the colonial legislature.
What says this house is more than 200 years old?
First it has the balance and proportion of Colonial construction. Specifically the 5 bays ( 2 windows, centered door, 2 windows), the massive central chimney and the angle of the roof. Secondly, the placing and sizes of the parts. Remove the shutters and the sidelights at the front door (added after 1810) and you would see a spare, very simple facade with wide spacing between the side windows and the window centered over the door.
Finally, this house is sited in the traditional Colonial way, to the weather: face the sun, back to the north wind. Even the side door at the back of the house faces south. It doesn't sit square to the road because the road came afterwards, laid out to come to the house.
Once there were outbuildings and a barn. Now you have to imagine its fields and pastures under the streets of South Lawrence.
The house was regularly used as a tavern. Certainly it was at the right location at the end of the road to Salem , Route 114, the Salem Turnpike. It was here that the Lawrecne Masonic Temple was founded,and this photograph is partof an historic brochure the Masons printed for the dedication of their new temple on Jackson Street in April, 1923.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#12 - 523 Andover St., S. Lawrence

South Lawrence home exemplifies the Victorian style of the late 1800's

Frank Carleton, a contractor and real estate dealer, built the house at 523 Andover St., South Lawrence, to be a model for his development "Carletonville", which he described as having "some of the most elegant and desirable residences in Lawrence".

He featured the house in a full page advertisement in "Lawrence, Up-To-Date, 1845-1894". The book praised Lawrence's 50 years of growth and progress. Prominent businesses took out ads in the back pages. The popular opinion was that Mr. Carleton's new development would be a failure because it was on the other side of the railroad tracks on a road that only went out to farms. Instead, Carletonville was a great success.

Despite its simplicity, the house is a good example of what home buyers wanted in 1895. It is really just a simple box with a small front extension with lots of details added on. The bay windows at the front of the house on the first and second floors are placed on the corner to create a tower. The two porches are gaudy with elaborate posts and railings. Even the windows are elaborate. The leaded glass window in the front is not just a simple square, but a six-pointed star. The trim, including the shutters, is painted in contrasting colors. Note the real shutters and that they have been swung shut on the second floor.

There is no record indicating why Mr.Carleton used a six-pointed star, but he liked fancy windows and put them into many of his houses in Carletonville.