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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 3
<br />W LEX.579
<br />staircase, and whatever chimney mass had been constructed in the main portion of the house when the original central chimney
<br />was removed. By 1984, subsequent modernization of the heating system meant that a chimney was not needed in the main block of the house, and this feature was either entirely removed or capped below the roofline by that date. A vent pipe located
<br />above the entrance in the 1984 photograph suggests a bathroom had been installed in the second-story space in front of the chimney. The replacement stair and chimney were not incorporated in the post-move restoration of the house; a new stair, of
<br />typical “U” shape but placed further to the north to provide a larger entrance lobby, was built subsequent to the move. A central chimney was not reconstructed although mantels were preserved or recreated in historically appropriate locations.
<br /> When the house was moved, a small addition located at the inside corner of the main block and two-story wing was removed. It
<br />was reconstructed in an approximation of its earlier form, using all new materials, and contains a bathroom and back stairs. Of the two small gable-roofed porches that sheltered the principal and side entrances to the house, only the side porch was kept
<br />after the house was moved. A new pedimented frontispiece was constructed for the front door, and windows were altered to reflect their presumed original configurations and sash divisions. Unfortunately, the small central window on the second story of
<br />the façade, a feature repeated on early houses elsewhere in Lexington (such as the Fiske house at 70 East Street) evidently to accommodate entrance pediments or porches, was replaced with a full-size window. The chimney venting the 19th century range
<br />was removed above the first-floor level. The present owners have lived in the house for three years. They informed us that they had been told that the interior doors were brought in by the person who restored the house.
<br /> HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Researched and written by Kathryn Grover The house now numbered 50 Kendall Road was moved from its original site at 29 Allen Street in 1988. In an article “Kite End” read before the Lexington Historical Society in 1891, A. Bradford Smith stated that the house was first owned by Joseph Smith (1743-1805), the son of Hezekiah Smith (1706-60), and has variously been dated to 1720 and 1750.1 The house at 56 Allen Street has been called the Hezekiah Smith house, on unstated authority, and has been dated to 1811. Hezekiah Smith was not living in Lexington in 1720 and was in any event too young to have built a house at that time. The next Hezekiah Smith (1768-1833), one of his grandsons, had moved to Providence, Rhode Island, by 1800 and is unlikely to have built 56 Allen Street. In 1732 Hezekiah Smith was living in Lexington when he acquired three acres of Lexington land from Joseph and Abigail Park of Newton. This first deed to Smith stated that the parcel was bounded on the southeast by the Dunback River, now known as part of Dunback Meadow and just east of Allen Street.2 It was very likely Hezekiah Smith who had the 29 Allen Street house built, perhaps soon after he acquired the parcel. Hezekiah Smith died in 1760 and left the use and improvement of his estate to his widow Elizabeth until their youngest son, Amos (born 1748) turned twenty-one, and he also bequeathed to her a third of his dwelling “from top to bottom cellar & all.” Sons Joseph and Amos were left the other two-thirds of all buildings. When Amos came of age, he and his older brother Joseph were to receive all their father’s land, and when Elizabeth Smith died her share of the estate would pass to those two sons. In 1769 Amos sold his brother Joseph both the willed share of his father’s estate and the half of the one-third widow’s dower he would have received at his mother’s death for 132 pounds.3 And in 1793 Joseph Smith and his son Jonas (1772-1811) acquired more than 52 acres bordering Joseph’s land in this section from Joseph’s fourth cousin Benjamin Smith (born 1741).4 By 1805, the year Joseph Smith died, the Allen Street farm was 120 acres. Joseph Smith had served on the town’s Committee of Correspondence and served in the Lexington company of minutemen at Cambridge in June 1775 and at Providence in 1778. He was a Lexington selectman in 1785, 1789, 1791, and 1793 and town
<br /> 1 Proceedings of the Lexington Historical Society, vol. II (1900), 115-116. https://archive.org/details/proceedingsoflex02lexi/page/114/. 2 Joseph and Abigail Park, Newton, to Hezekiah Smith, Lexington, 11 December 1732, MSD 41:399. Charles Hudson, History of the Town of Lexington, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, from Its First Settlement to 1868 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 2:634-38, states that Hezekiah and his wife Elizabeth Welling Smith were dismissed from the church in Waltham to the church in Lexington on 30 July 1736 and admitted to the Lexington church in September of that year, but the 1732 deed states that Smith was already living in Lexington by that time. 3 Amos Smith to Joseph Smith, 5 June 1769, MSD 92:174 (not recorded until 20 January 1780 or 1786). 4 Benjamin Smith, Lexington, to Joseph Smith, gentleman, and Jonas Smith, laborer, 24 December 1793, MSD 116:155. Joseph Smith alaos acquired land from Thomas Bridge, who had moved to Hampshire County, in 1789 (MSD 92:175) and from a “J. Wellington” in 1773 (MSD 74:341, not accessible on Middlesex South Registry of Deeds website).
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