'Summer houses with history': A taste of Newport on the South Shore
Newport, Rhode Island, has its mansions, but the South Shore has its own grand historical homes where the public can marvel at the lives of the upper class. Most of these “cottages” were stately homes designed by notable architects. This is the latest in The Patriot Ledger's summer series "Summer Houses with History."
Modern architecture in Duxbury
The Pillsbury House is what the National Register of Historic Places calls “the only documented example of modern architecture in Duxbury.” Though the Pillsbury House may stand out among historical Duxbury homes, it was designed to blend in with its natural surroundings, looking almost as if it grew there naturally among the trees and the marsh.
This interplay with nature was no mistake. According to an online lecture delivered by Wendy Cox, a professor of architecture at Norwich University, Sarah Pillsbury Harkness wrote in a letter that she paid careful attention to "where the summer breezes and winter winds came from, the conflict of view to the north and sun to the south and the difficulty of planning around the giant pine trees on the one side and the ancient beech trees to the other."
Read more about The Pillsbury House.
A Braintree house with a long history
It wasn't in the mountains, and the shore was miles away. But Jechonias Thayer had something else in mind when he built the landmark Greek Revival home on Elm Street as a summer retreat for his wife and his family: proximity to family.
The blog "Buildings of New England" describes the Jechonias Thayer House as a "high-style, temple-front Greek Revival home in the Doric order. The two-story columns support the colonnade and heavy, pedimented gable."
Read more about Jechonias Thayer House.
A true summer retreat
In stark contrast to flamboyance of the Burrage family's Back Bay mansion sits Camp Kiwanee in Hanson, a summer destination for generations of South Shore children that started out as the summer home of Albert C. Burrage.
Burrage, a Harvard-educated copper baron from Boston, purchased the land on Maquan Pond in 1899, and built a home that was destroyed in a fire in 1907. A large, cabin-style rustic home known as "The Needles" was rebuilt in 1908, along with a stone firehouse and cottage building.
According to historian Timothy Orwig, who drafted the site's application for the National Register of Historic Properties in 2005, Burrage acquired a number of homes over the years, but The Needles was truly a summer retreat, complete with the large, shingle, Adirondack-style home that still exists as the main lodge.
'Cottage' dweller becomes a 'townie'
It was the era of the "summer colony," when Boston's affluent bankers and merchants built "cottage" sanctuaries along the South Shore to escape the city heat. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, imposing estates, designed and landscaped by famous architects, rose along the rock ledges over Cohasset Harbor. Many remain standing today.
While most of the wealthy socialites colonizing Cohasset's shores returned to Beacon Hill and Back Bay at season's end, one man became something of a townie, working on local affairs and projects for the next several decades until his death. That man was Joseph S. Bigelow.
His former estate now stands at 39 Black Horse Lane in Cohasset. Its Colonial Revival design was typical of the large summer "cottages" built at the time. The impressive façade has seven bays on the upper story, an open porch supported by four columns and a bay window with three sashes next to the porch on the first floor.
Read more about Bigelow estate.
'An escape from Boston'
The long, tree-lined driveway leading to the Eleanor Cabot Bradley Estate is easy to miss from bustling Route 138.
The 90-acre Bradley Estate was once occupied by members of the Massachusett Tribe before serving as a Colonial-era farm through the 1700s. Known as Cherry Hill Farm due to its mature cherry trees, the property then served as a tavern through 1865, when Samuel Cabot bought the property as a summer residence.
Read more about the Bradley estate.
An evolving property
Howland Davis was a Plymouth boy who had gone to Harvard and became a successful New York investment banker. His house had a large Italianate garden created by Joseph Everett Chandler, a noted architect and landscape designer of many Boston landmarks, including the restoration of the Paul Revere House.
He died in 1930; his wife, Anna Shippen Davis, lived until 1945. The couple resided in New York but also left 25 acres in Plymouth with four houses, a large barn, a rolling meadow, woodlands and a water tower with views of the Sagamore Bridge.
Almost a century later, the two homes are separate from the rest of the family property, which in 2012 was donated to the Wildlands Trust, just across Morgan Road.
Read more about the Davis-Douglas property.
A fitting new use
Nestled in the granite ledges are a handful of stone houses built more than a century ago. They are reminders of the Gilded Age when a group of wealthy Boston businessmen had their summer homes here, part of a 50-acre estate overlooking Straits Pond in Cohasset.
Col. Albert Augustus Pope, a pioneer in both the bicycle and automobile industries, was among the best-known of the well-connected landowners group. By the late 1800s, Pope's company was the world's largest producer of bicycles.
Read more about Pope's estate.
This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: South Shore homes where the upper class spent their summers
