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ARCHITECTURAL SIGNIFICANCE (Describe important architectural features and <br /> evaluate in terms of other buildings within the community.) <br /> One of the surviving farmhouses built along the Cambridge-Concord Turnpike <br /> (see Concord Avenue area form) , this house, five bays wide, two stories high, <br /> two bays deep, and with two rear chimneys -- has a typical Federal Vernacular <br /> profile. Other features are the first story windows which are slightly longer <br /> than those on the second and the pilasters on either side of the front door <br /> which, before the addition of the porch, very likely formed part of a simple <br /> Federal frontispiece. Like the Federal farmhouses at 353 Concord Avenue and <br /> (see Continuation Sheet) <br /> HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE (Explain the role owners played in local or state <br /> history and how the building relates to the development of the community.) <br /> - According to an antiquarian account, this house was built in 1815 for <br /> Ebenezer Smith. The house previously on the site burned on January 31, 1815, <br /> one of the coldest days in years, and because Smith did not have it insured, <br /> - the neighbors chipped in to help him build a new one (Smith 1891:107) . The <br /> 1830 map shows a house on this site, then the corner of Concord Avenue and <br /> Waltham Street. (The stone wall that bordered the old Waltham Street can still <br /> be seen to the east of the driveway of this house.) <br /> .Ebenezer Smith belonged to a family that had first moved to Lexington <br /> from Watertown in the late seventeenth century and by the beginning_ of the <br /> nineteenth century had so many members who lived in the south part of town that <br /> it was known as "Smith's End." Ebenezer himself was a shoemaker; most of his <br /> customers apparently lived in Boston though his workshop was at his house in <br /> Lexington. (None of the present outbuildings appear to be a shoemaker's shop, <br /> however.) He reportedly retired in 1848 at the age of 68; the 1852 map indicates <br /> that he still owned the house on this site (no longer the corner of Waltham <br /> Street, which had been moved to its present location) , but the 1853 man indicates <br /> that it was owned by Elbridge Farmer, Ebenezer Smith's son-in-law (Hudson 1913, <br /> 11:643) . Smith died in 1860 and by 1876 the house was owned by George O. <br /> Wellington, a farrier who had moved to Lexington from Waltham in 1859 and was a <br /> grandnephew of David Wellington on Pleasant St. (see 13&iPleasant St. form) . <br /> _ George Wellington still owned the property in 1906; <br /> (see Continuation Sheet) <br /> BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES (name of publication, author, date and publisher) <br /> Hudson, Charles. History of the Town of Lexington, Volume II. Boston: Houghton <br /> Mifflin, 1913. <br /> i <br /> Kelley, Beverly Allison. Lexington: A Century of Photographs. Lexington, <br /> Massachusetts: Lexington HIstorical Society, 1980. <br /> Lexington Historical Society, Burr Church Collection. <br /> Smith, A. Bradford. "Kite End"(1891). Proceedings of the Lexington HIstorical <br /> Society II (1900) :99-122. <br /> 1830 map <br /> 1852 map <br /> 1853 map <br /> 1876 map <br /> 1906 map <br /> 1906 Directory <br /> 10M - 7/82 <br />