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INSIDE HISTORIC BOSTON INC.
What We Do
Handmade Houses Partnership
Throughout Boston, early frame buildings, built long before the city became a densely populated urban center are scattered amid more modern single and multi-family structures. These buildings, many threatened by new development and benign neglect, are important reminders of the city's evolution and change.
Handmade Houses, a partnership of Historic Boston and the North Bennet Street School, was created to preserve these irreplaceable historic resources. They are distinctive for their hand-hewn construction materials and methods, most of which changed with mechanization and mass production in the mid-19th century.
Using Traditional Methods for Preservation
North Bennet Street School's Preservation Carpentry Department trains students to preserve early buildings using the same skills that were deployed to build them. This program provides a real-life training ground that allows students to learn to restore and repair early buildings through first hand experience. At the same time, important places in Boston are saved in a cost-effective manner.
Historic Boston Inc. identifies the target properties for this program and serves as project coordinator, handling all real estate transactions and overseeing work on non-carpentry related projects, such as masonry repairs, interior fit-outs, systems installation, and landscape preservation.
The Partnership purchases control of a threatened historic resource, carries out the improvements necessary to preserve the building, and sells the improved project, revolving the investment into another at-risk property.
The Handmade Houses project is generously supported by the 1772 Foundation.
Gallery
At the Anna Clapp Harris Smith House, HBI and North Bennet Street School secured a purchase option on the 1804 house from its current owner. Over a two-year period, the parternship has been carrying out improvements to the house including foundation reconstruction, chimney rebuilding, archeology, clapboard restoration and fabrication of a new period-appropriate door and 12 over 12 pane windows, hand built by North Bennet Street School.
The existing five bay, Federal period structure was built in 1804 after a fire burned the original home that is believed to have been built in 1636 by the Jones family.
The layout and design of the rooms in the existing house is indicative of first period architecture more typical of the seventeenth century.
65 Pleasant Street's most notable resident was Anna Clapp Harris Smith. Born in 1843, Mrs. Harris lived in the home most of her life. She founded the Animal Rescue League in 1899, devoting her life to the protection and improvement of the lives of animals. For its age and associations, the Anna Clapp Harris Smith house is significant historically, culturally and architecturally to Dorchester, Boston and the nation.
The existing house sits on top of the original mid-seventeenth century fieldstone foundation.
Once the house is completed, a buyer will be found and proceeds will be reinvested into another endangered early home.
