What’s in a name? Mapping Brookline Neighborhoods

Nearly 300 Brookline people responded to my survey about what they call their Brookline neighborhoods. I mapped the responses and wrote about them in an article on Brookline News.

You can read the article and see neighborhood-by-neighborhood maps at https://brookline.news/whats-in-a-name-mapping-brookline-neighborhoods-with-help-from-readers/. 

Take a look and see if you agree with what others call your neighborhood or other parts of town.

3 Doctors & Their 19th Century Brookline Houses

If you stand on the northeast side of Washington Street about halfway between its intersections with Greenough Street and Weybridge Road you'll be in one angle of a triangle formed by three Brookline houses from three different eras of the 19th century.

Aerial view via Google Maps showing: 1) 26 Weybridge Road (formerly 446 Washington Street); 2) 447 Washington Street; and 3) 432 Washington Street. All three are visible from the spot marked with a star.

Dating these houses based on their architectural styles can be confusing:

• #1 -- 26 Weybridge Road -- is in the style of the Colonial Revival of the late 19th-early 20th century and appears to be the newest of the three but is actually the oldest, built in 1822. It was redesigned in 1868 and again, as a Colonial Revival home, in 1922. A more recent (2016) renovation restored elements of that 1920s design that had deteriorated or been removed in later years.
• #2 -- 447 Washington Street -- was built smack dab in the middle of the century, c1850.
  
• #3 -- 432 Washington Street has the look of a pre-Revolution house, but only because it was designed as a replica of John Hancock's Beacon Hill mansion, built by his uncle in the 1730s and torn down in 1863. It is actually the newest of the three, built in 1895. 

When the most recent of these -- the Hancock replica -- was built, there was very little around them on the now densely built-up section of this busy thoroughfare between Brookline Village and Washington Square.

The three houses shown on the 1900 Brookline atlas

All three houses were originally the homes of doctors and their families. But the three doctors -- Charles Wild, Charles Wheelwright, and Benjamin Blanchard -- were as different from one another as are their still-standing houses. 

Left to right: Drs. Charles Wild (1795-1864), Charles Wheelwright (1813-1862), and Benjamin Blanchard (1856-1921)

The Wild-Sargent House (1822)

The oldest of the three houses, now known as the Wild-Sargent House, was built in 1822 for Dr. Charles Wild and his wife Mary Johanna (Rhodes) Wild. There are no known photographs of the house showing how it originally looked. The oldest known photo shows the house in 1868, after a post-Civil War renovation by it's fourth owner.

Today's 26 Weybridge Road as it appeared from Washington Street in 1868 after a major redesign. It retained this design for more than 50 years.

The house was remodeled again as part of the Blake Park development of the 1920s.

Image credit:

Public Library of Brookline

Charles Wild (1795-1864) was born in Boston, graduated from Harvard in 1814, and was granted a medical degree in March 1818. (His dissertation was on delerium tremens.) Harriet Woods in her Historical Sketches of Brookline, published in 1874, presented a lengthy profile of Dr. Wild.

Those who can remember the doctor in his prime [wrote Woods], can well recall his tall, well-formed figure, his firm tread, his deep voice which seemed to come from cavernous depths, and eyes which seemed to look from behind his spectacles into and through one.

Woods described the doctor's typical way of announcing his arrival to see a patient:

He had a breezy way of entering a house, stamping off the snow or dust with enough noise for three men, throwing off his overcoat, untying a huge muffler that he wore around his neck, and letting down his black leather pouch with emphasis. There was an indescribable noise he made sometimes with that deep gruff voice of his which cannot be represented in type.

Dr. Wild, widely respected in town for his knowledge, abilities, and advice, was skilled in the mixing and administering of potions, in bloodletting, and in other techniques practiced by the physicians of his day. In 1839, he became interested in the emerging ideas of homeopathy.

The second meeting of New England physicians interested in this new kind of practice took place at the house on Washington Street in 1841. It led to the formation of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Fraternity.

The Wilds' second son, Edward Augustus Wild, was also a doctor, until he lost an arm serving in the Civil War. He later returned to service as a general commanding troops of formerly enslaved African American soldiers.

For much more on the life of the Wild family in their Brookline home, see the 1851-1865 diary of Mary Johanna Wild, digitized by Boston College and annotated by the Brookline Historical Society.

The Candler Cottage (1850)

In 1847, Mary Johanna Wild wrote to her oldest son, Charles, then in Shanghai where he was engaged in the China trade, that

As I sit at the old desk in the study now, I can look out and count more than 30 new houses put up in the last year.

Three years later, another new house, directly across Washington Street from the Wild house, appeared.  A sketch of the house, designed by architect Richard Bond, was included in a book, American Cottage and Villa Architecture. published in 1850. It shows open land around around the house, with Aspinwall Hill rising in the distance on the left.

 

Image credit: Historic New England

The first owners of the house were Susan Candler and her brother Dr. Charles Wheelwright. They were joined by Susan's five children, ranging in age from 24 to 11, and two Irish-born servants. Susan's husband had died in 1842.

Writing to a nephew in February 1850, Wheelwright said the family, then living in Boston, was looking to find a country house to purchase:

We have concluded to seek placdium quietam in rure felice. There we must be near railroad and omnibuses, we must have open fields and sunny hills....We have found a beautiful place exactly eighteen minutes distant from Worcester Railroad Depot in Boston. It is nearly opposite the Aspinwal place on the road from Brookline to Brighton. It is very expensive but land is increasing in value so rapidly that if we can get it at a fair market price we think we shall buy, Susan and myself conjointly.

 
Family members, wrote Wheelwright, had visited the house and were much pleased with it:

It is really a beautiful place, well back from the road. A cottage with two arched towers and quite high and really airy chambers, fifteen rooms in all, barn, etc., and 300 fruit trees. I shall offer 9500 dollars and fear it will not bring it. I will be sorry to lose it as it offers so many facilities and conveniences not to be found in other places.

Dr. Charles Wheelwright

In the end, they were able to purchase the house and land for $8,500.

Charles Wheelwright was born in Boston in 1813. He graduated from Harvard in 1834 and earned a medical degree there in 1837. In 1839, he joined the U.S. Navy as a surgeon and would remain in naval service for the rest of his life, serving in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf of Mexico. In 1859, he was part of Commodore Matthew Perry's expedition to Japan.

At the outbreak of war, Wheelwright was serving in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on a board examining men for their fitness to serve in the Navy. Despite his own poor health, he applied for active duty. He served in Virginia and, later, as fleet surgeon for the Gulf Fleet. He was then assigned to a hospital near the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, treating troops of the River Squadron.

Suffering from poor working conditions, exhaustion, diarrhea, and general poor health, he died of disease in Pilot Town, Louisiana, on July 30, 1862. He was 49 years old. He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. The house remained in the Candler family through the end of the war.

 

The Blanchard House (John Hancock House Replica) (1895)

In 1863 the Beacon Hill land containing the former home of John Hancock was sold. Plans to move the house to the Back Bay fell through. Protests against its demolition went unheeded. In August the house was demolished, replaced by two townhouses. (In 1917, the townhouses were replaced by an extension to the State House.)

 
 

The former Hancock mansion on Beacon Hill and a  June 1863 broadside that was printed and distributed in Boston in a failed attempt to save the building from demolition. (Credits: house photo, Boston Public Library; broadside, Historic New England)

The loss of the former home of one of Boston's and the nation's Founding Fathers was a factor in the growth of the historic preservation movement. In the decade after its demolition, another landmark of the Revolution, the Old South Meeting House, which had barely survived the Great Boston Fire of 1872, was saved from demolition after the church moved to a new building in the Back Bay. 

At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the Massachusetts State Building, designed by the noted Boston firm Peabody & Stearns, was modeled after the demolished Hancock mansion. At the dedication of the building in October 1892, Massachusetts governor William Russell spoke of the symbolic importance of the design:

I think there is something grand and most instructive in these historic buildings. They link the past with the present, with lessons of patriotism, suffering and sacrifice; they speak of men who were patriotic, events which were epoch making and the beginning of a great nation....

This building comes close to the heart of Massachusetts, not merely because it is beautiful in design and correct in proportion, but because it speaks of Hancock, his life and his services, and recalls a great agitation, a struggle for liberty and independence, in which Massachusetts and her ideas were leading to form and develop a great and majestic republic

 

The Massachusetts building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, as shown in Campbell's Illustrated history of the World's Columbian Exposition (1894)

The Massachusetts building was itself demolished after the Exposition. (Another building from the Exposition, built for the Van Houten Cocoa Company as a replica of a 16th century Dutch town hall, was purchased by a Brookline resident, Charles Appleton. It was taken apart, brick by brick, and reconstructed on a new street in Brookline. Now known as the Dutch House, it stands on Netherlands Road, near the Muddy River.)

Two years after the end of the Exposition, architect Joseph Everett Chandler designed a new home, also modeled on the Hancock mansion, at the corner of Washington and Greenough Streets in Brookline for Benjamin and Clara Blanchard.

Chandler was an important figure in the Colonial Revival style of architecture that flourished in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Blanchard House was the first of four houses he designed that were modeled on the Hancock house and the one that most closely followed the design of the original. 

This photo and floor plan were included in Joseph Chandler's 1916 book The Colonial House

The original stone facade, which Chandler described as "the best of Colonial stonework," was replicated in wood as closely as possible.

 

The other Chandler houses modeled on the Hancock house include 58 Allerton Road in Brookline and homes in Weston and in Chandler's native Plymouth. He also designed several other buildings in Brookline, including an art gallery for the Blanchards' neighbor Desmond Fitzgerald, now the Church of Christ at 416 Washington Street.

Chandler is probably best known for his restoration of historic buildings, including the Paul Revere House in the North End of Boston and the House of Seven Gables in Salem. (For much more on Chandler and his work, see his 1922 book The Colonial House.

Another still-standing building modeled on the Hancock mansion -- though not designed by Chandler -- is the stone headquarters of the Ticonderoga Historical Society in Ticonderoga, NY, built for the New York State Historical Society in 1926.

Photo credit:
HUP Blanchard, Benjamin S. (1).
Harvard University Archives.

Benjamin Seaver Blanchard graduated from Harvard in 1877 and from Harvard Medical School in 1882. He practiced for a year in Roxbury where, as he later wrote,

 [I] had a fair amount of work, little pecuniary recompense, but plenty of blessings, some curses, and good opportunities to study human nature.

Blanchard came to Brookline in 1883. He lived and had an office at 18 Davis Avenue in Brookline Village. In 1887, he married Clara Fessenden Barnes, and eight years later they bought land from the Blake estate to build their new house.

Blanchard maintained his medical practice out of the Washington Street house. He was also active in town affairs, serving as a Town Meeting Member and a member of the school committee, and as a medical inspector for the schools and the Gymnasium and Baths Committee.

He was a leading figure in the town's efforts to combat various epidemics and threats to community health through inspections and vaccinations. Blanchard died at home of rheumatic fever in 1921. He was 64 years old.

Richards Tavern, Chestnut Hill

The 18th century building shown here was known as the Richards Tavern or Richards Hotel. It stood on Heath Street (foreground) near the intersection with Hammond Street, approximately where 521 Heath Street is today. 

 

(Note: This article first appeared in Brookline Patch as part of a biweekly series of historical images of Brookline from the Brookline Historical Society and the Public Library of Brookline.)

View larger size image

It was built sometime between 1750 and 1770 — sources vary — by Ebenezer Winchester, a member of the religious splinter group called the “New Lights,” one of many groups that arose as part of the religious revival known as The Great Awakening. In addition to serving as the Winchester home, it included a large hall for meetings of Winchester’s co-religionists.

The house passed through two other owners before being sold to Ebenezer Richards who operated it as a tavern and hotel until about 1830. The Worcester Turnpike (now Route 9) which opened in 1806 passed just to the rear of the tavern. A toll gate and a toll house for the gatekeeper were placed at that spot on the Turnpike which no doubt contributed to the success of the tavern (It became something like an early 18th century version of a modern highway rest stop.)

The former tavern was acquired by Irish immigrant William Fegan in 1863. Fegan operated it as a boarding house. Harriet Woods in her Historical Sketches of Brookline (1874) described it as “now occupied by many Irish tenants.” Fegan died in 1911 at the age of 87. The house, deteriorating in condition (as seen in the 1927 photos below), remained in the Fegan family until it was torn down in 1928. 

View zoomable larger size image

 

View zoomable larger size image

 

The map below, adapted from a segment of the 1927 Brookline atlas, shows the former Richards Tavern (highlighted by the red rectangle and with the name J.J. Fegan) on Heath Street near the corner of Hammond Street. Boylston Street (Route 9) runs from the top edge to the right edge. The Baldwin School is at lower right and part of Holyhood Cemetery is at lower left. 

 

Click image for larger view

 

A Brookline Village Bounty, 1836

Hundreds of fruit trees, berry bushes, grapevines, herbs, and flowers in the heart of Brookline Village? Hard to picture isn't it?

But an 1836 property advertisement in the Boston Post paints a delightful picture of just such a bounty in the block bounded by present-day Washington Street, Davis Avenue, Waverly Street, and Thayer Street.

The Grounds are extensive and filled with all the choicest fruit, flowering shrubs, vines, herbaceous plants, &c, adapted to out door culture—a part as follows: Several hundred ornamental and fruit trees, pears, peaches, plums, Cherries, apples, &c, all in bearing state—ten large strawberry beds, (will produce this season five hundred boxes—200 currant, red and white Dutch raspberry and gooseberry—from six to ten hundred rose bushes—many hundred herbaceous plants, Dahlias, &c—large bed of tulips—border of pinks. A Grapery, containing 21 different kinds, and will probably produce three tons this season—the fruit, vines, &c are all of the choicest kinds and selected with great care and experience, and all in the most flourishing condition.

The area bounded today by Washington Street on the north, Davis Avenue on the south, and Thayer and Waverly Streets on the west was once filled with a wide variety of flora planted by the Thayer brothers. The star marks the location of the house, later 43 Davis Avenue, built by Isaac Thayer in 1832.

The ad — "COUNTRY SEAT FOR SALE AT AUCTION" — was placed on behalf of Isaac Thayer by the Boston auction house Coolidge & Haskell. (See the full ad at the bottom of this post.) Thayer and his brother Seth had bought a large tract of land a few years earlier and both brothers built houses near Washington Street.

Seth Thayer's house was on land belonging to the Davis family. (He wife was a Davis.) His brother Isaac's house was on Washington Place, later renamed Davis Avenue, on a part of the land purchased by the brothers. Here's how he described it in the ad:

The house is large and every way convenient—containing on the ground floor, two parlors with folding doors--broad entry from front to rear—sitting room—kitchen, washroom &c. It commands a view of the city and surrounding country, and of the travel on four great roads.

The house built in 1832 by Isaac Thayer as it appeared in the late 19th century under the ownership of Frederick and Lucy Beck.
Source: A History of the Beck Family (1907)

The "four great roads" likely refers to the Worcester Turnpike (now Route 9), the Brighton Road (now Washington Street) the Road to the College (now Harvard Street) and Cypress Street. For potential buyers wary of the proximity to traffic on these "great roads" the ad notes that the property is "entirely out of the reach of dust."

The property did not sell in 1836. Thayer advertised it again (with much less description) in May and June 1837. It was eventually sold to James Patten. (The date of the sale is uncertain.) A new Town Hall on Washington Street in 1844 and the coming of the railroad to Brookline Village in 1847 spurred extensive development in the neighborhood. The property was subdivided into many parcels in the following decades, no doubt with the loss of much of the horticulture.

The former Thayer house and its much reduced property were acquired by Frederick and Lucy Beck around 1869.

This partial map from the 1874 Brookline atlas shows the former Isaac Thayer property broken into several parcels filled with new development, especially on the Washington Street side. The large pink property marked F. Beck includes the original Thayer house.
Source: WardMaps LLC

43 Davis Avenue as photographed after the blizzard of November 1898
Source: A History of the Beck Family (1907)

Frederick Beck died in 1909 and his wife Lucy in 1915. The house was torn down shortly after that. The Berkeley Court cul-de-sac was developed on the site of the house in the early 1920s.

Berkeley Court, off Davis Avenue, on the site of the former Thayer (later Beck) house. (Via Google Earth)

The former Isaac Thayer property on a 2016 map (Via Google Maps)

This advertisement for an auction of Isaac Thayer's property appeared in the Boston Post on May 30, 1836. (Click the ad for a larger view)

"Blake Park" Walking Tour — Sunday 2 pm

In 1880, Boston banker Arthur Welland Blake engaged Frederick Law Olmsted to draw plans for the subdivision into roads and lots of the Blake family estate on Aspinwall Hill.

Olmsted and his firm drew numerous plans for the Blakes over the next 15 years, but they were never executed. The estate remained something of an anomaly: a large tract of open land, renowned for its landscaping, in the heart of a community rapidly developing as a "streetcar suburb".

It wasn't until 1916 that land was sold, roads were laid out — somewhat differently than Olmsted had envisioned them — and the development of "Blake Park" was announced with some fanfare.

Death and financial scandal delayed development for another decade. Finally, in 1925, with both Blake and Olmsted long dead, a new largely middle-class neighborhood began to emerge, populated by the families of bankers and brokers, doctors and lawyers, salesman, college professors, contractors, and local merchants.

This free, 90-minute walking tour will tell the story of the transformation (in fits and starts) of this part of Brookline from a private estate to a residential neighborhood that remains largely as it was when first built.

The tour begins — rain or shine — at 2:00 pm in front of the main entrance to Brookline High School on Greenough Street.