Quincy, Mass. Historical and Architectural Survey

416 Belmont Street

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
The Wollaston/Forbes Hill neighborhood of Quincy is bounded by the M.B.T.A. tracks (east), Furnace Brook Parkway (south), Adams Street (west) and Beale Street (north). In 1869 the Wollaston Land Associates purchased an initial 300 acres on and near the Wollaston Hills for the purpose of developing a status residential area. This was a portion of the tract allotted in 1636 by the Town of Boston to William Hutchinson, the husband of Mistress Anne Hutchinson. When the development began in 1870 there was but one house in the entire section from the railroad tracks to Adams Street to the Milton line. The early lots sold for about 12 cents a foot but the development accelerated after George F. Pinkham, the business manager of the Associates, got the Old Colony Railroad to issue free passes good for three years to anyone purchasing a house lot from the land company. To quote H. Hobart Holly: "This emphasis on commuting was an important factor in setting the pattern for Wollaston and communities to the north as primarily residential rather than manufacturing areas." Forbes Hill lies a bit to the West of Wollaston Hill and is dominated by a magnificent standpipe and the Furnace Brook Golf Course.

Set well back from the road on the rise of Wollaston Hill, Number 416 Belmont Street was probably designed c. 1892 by its owner/architect Arthur C. Sprague. In a remarkable example of continuity of family ownership, the house stayed in the Sprague family until after 1935.

BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Assessors Records.
William Churchill Edwards. Historic Quincy. Massachusetts, 1957, p. 297.
H. Hobart Holly, ed. Quincy: 350 Years, 1974, p. 51.
vincent J. Scully, Jr. The Shingle Style and the Stick Style. Yale University Press, 1971.
D. Foster Taylor, "Wollaston As It Was In 1870's." (written in 1946). Quincy History, Quincy Historical Society, January 1985.

ARCHITECTURAL SIGNIFICANCE:
The Shingle Style which followed the exhuberant Queen Anne Style was favored for sea side and suburban homes. The trend began with the grandiose shingled summer homes of McKim, Mead and White in the 1880s and continued with the fine Shingle Style houses of William Ralph Emerson in Massachusetts and John Calvin Stevens in Maine. They were characterized by quiet compact massing, enveloping roofs which were often gambreled, simple classic details and the use of weathered shingles to "wrap" the house. It was considered an American derived architecture which was influenced by the early weathered clapboarded and shingled 17th century houses then being studied with great avidity. The continued interest in the architectural past of the East Coast led soon after to the Colonial Revival Style.

This Shingle Style house high up on Belmont Street recalls the Emerson or Stevens homes designed for Bostonians for summer use on the islands of Maine. Massed under a large enveloping ridge roof pierced by large dormers, its dominant element is the fu11 length porch atop a high foundation of vari-colored granite and shingles with a large arched opening. It will be recommended that this property be included in the proposed National Register Wollaston Hill Historic District.

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