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INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET LEXINGTON 50 KENDALL ROAD
<br /> MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
<br />220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125
<br />Continuation sheet 5
<br />W LEX.579
<br />as the adjacent “Hardy farm,” valued at $1500. The estate included seventeen cows and other livestock, and Allen had very little
<br />debt. His personal estate was sold for more than its estimated value, and the estate administrator sold $1154.40 of mil and $316 in other farm products.
<br /> Lavinia Munroe Allen died in late April 1865 at the age of forty-three, and the court-appointed guardians for her three minor
<br />children sold the Allen Farm to Mortimer G. Ferris of Brookline in October of the same year.10 The next month Ferris leased the farm operation for ten years to Leavitt and Hunnewell, a real estate firm composed of Bostonian Thomas H. Leavitt and Francis
<br />Hunnewell of Roxbury; he also split off several parcels and sold them about the same time. In 1867 both Ferris, acting as trustee under the will of Mary E. Bullock of Cambridge, sold the 29 Allen Street farm to Albert Bullock of Lexington, and Leavitt and
<br />Hunnewell released their rights under the lease to Bullock at the same time. Bullock, a tobacconist and cigar manufacturer who lived in Cambridge, was married to Mary E. Pendlebury of Lubec, Maine, who died in 1863. Her will directed her husband to
<br />keep her property in trust for the use of their five children and permitted him to sell real estate to enhance the income from the trust. He and his son Albert E. Bullock both owned dwellings on the west side of Waltham Street, not far from this farm, in 1875.
<br /> In 1869 Bullock sold three parcels of the Galen Allen farm, including the dwelling, to Frederick Hutchins of Watertown for $4600;
<br />a few months later Hutchins sold them to James H. Webber of Lynn for $3425. Less than a year later Webber sold the three to Mary E. Darling of Boston for $5000. Darling, a native of Nova Scotia, was married to Vermont-born teamster and grocer
<br />Thomas Darling. Three years later, in 1873, Mary Darling sold two of the three parcels—the 10-acre homestead lot on the west side of Allen Street and a three-acre lot opposite it—to George Bullock of Boston for $3000.11 The 1875 map of Lexington marks
<br />the dwelling “G. Bullock,” but the identity of this George Bullock is not clear. A wood turner and sawyer by that name lived in Boston, but one of Albert and Mary E. Bullock’s children was named George W. Bullock, also a cigar maker, who lived in
<br />Waltham. It seems more likely to have been the latter, though he lived in Waltham in the 1870s and early 1880s.
<br />In April 1882 Bullock sold both parcels to Helen M. Richards for $2000. Richards was the wife of David W. Richards, also a native Vermonter; 1890s Lexington directories list him as a farmer on Allen Street. In 1899 David W. Richards sold the Allen
<br />Farm to Willard Clark Schouler, a wood engraver and landscape painter who lived in Arlington.12 Schouler was a grandson of Scots immigrant James Schouler, said to have established the first calico printing works in this county after emigrating in 1816,
<br />and a nephew of William Schouler, the adjutant general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts during the Civil War. He owned the 29 Allen Street property only briefly: he deeded it to his sister Mary in 1904, she sold it less than two years later to
<br />Caroline Spaulding of Bedford, and Spaulding and her husband Charles sold it in November 1906 to Axel M. Swenson of Boston. The Allen farm again had stable ownership—though not occupancy—for the first time since Galen Allen, for the
<br />Swenson family owned it until 1988.13
<br />Axel Martin Swenson (1874-1950) was born in Sweden and came to Boston in 1895. He described himself as a “dairyman” when he applied for citizenship in 1905, the year his brother Henning Wilhelm Swenson (1886-1975) joined him in Lexington.
<br />The brothers lived at 29 Allen Street with their sister Emma, who had emigrated in 1899 and kept house for them. In 1910 Martin (or A. Martin) and Henning (sometimes Henry) lived in the house with Emma and a Swedish immigrant farm laborer. By 1920
<br />the brothers had established themselves as Swenson Brothers, dairy farmers and milk dealers.14 In that year they still lived with
<br /> 10 Isaac N. Damon, guardian of John G. Allen and Lavinia M. Allen, minor children of Galen Allen, to Mortimer G. Ferris, Brookline, 27 October 1865, MSD 975:343; Lauriston Grout, Acworth NH, guardian of Jonas M. Allen, Minor child of Galan Allen, to Mortimer G. Ferris, Brookline, 27 October 1865, MSD 975:346; Indenture, 15 November 1865, between Mortimer C. Ferris, Brookline, and Thomas H. Leavitt, Boston and Francis Hunnewell, Roxbury, partners in Leavitt & Hunnewell, MSD 959:220. 11 Albert Bullock, trustee will Mary E. Bullock, Cambridge, to Frederick Hutchins, Watertown, 22 June 1869, MSD 1086:97; Frederick Hutchins, Lexington, to James H. Webber, Lynn, 5 October 1869, MSD 1098:168; James H. Webber, Lexington, to Mary E. Darling, Boston, 16 September 1870, MSD 1129:464; Mary E. and Thomas Darling to George Bullock, Boston, 30 June 1873, MSD 1270:385. 12 George Bullock, Boston, to Helen M. Richards, 15 April 1882, MSD 1596:65; David W. Richards to Willard C. Schouler, Arlington, 6 Nov. 1901, MSD 2929:460. David W. Richards was at the Lexington almshouse by 1910 and died at the state infirmary at Tewksbury in 1912. 13 Willard C. Schouler, Arlington, to Mary W. Schouler, 29 October 1904, MSD 3128:493, Mary W. Schouler, Arlington, to Caroline Spaulding, Bedford, 24 September 1906, MSD 3257:97; Charles F. and Caroline Spaulding to Axel M. Swenson, Boston, 20 November 1906, MSD 3270:18. Very little is known about Schouler’s work. He exhibited at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston in 1904 and at the annual Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts exhibitions in 1913 and 1919. See also “Willard C. Schouler,” Boston Herald, 1 May 1934, 15. 14 In 1919 and 1920 first Henning Swenson and then Swenson Brothers were among the Massachusetts milk dealers fined for either possessing or selling milk “below the standard quality.” Henning Swenson had applied to be a citizen in 1925 but was denied for “immoral character.” See Boston Globe, 10 December 1919, 3, and 10 June 1920, 13, and Henning Swenson’s 1931 naturalization papers.
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