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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 4
<br />W LEX.579
<br />assessor in 1796-98 and 1804. In 1765 he married Lucy Stone (1742/43-1772) of Rutland, and after her death he married in
<br />1777 Abigail Ingoldsby (1750-1814). Joseph Smith had twelve children. Sons Hezekiah (born 1768) and John (born 1779) moved to Providence, and sons Amos (born 1748) and Ralph (born 1792) moved to Boston. His eldest son, Joseph (1767-1813)
<br />married Susanna Dakin of Maine and lived in Lexington and Weston.
<br />At his death in 1805 Joseph Smith owned an estimated one hundred acres with a house and a barn valued at $4100, a personal estate worth $549.20, and was owed $370 from the town of Lexington “for building two school houses.” He left no will, so the
<br />probate court appointed a committee to determine the value of the estate and the widow’s one-third share of that estate. The inventory set the value of real and personal estate at $4120 and described the homestead as “lying the west side of the road”
<br />containing an estimated 78 acres with another 20 acres on the east side of Allen Street. The “Mansion house” was estimated to be worth $400 and the barn and “mill house” at $75. The widowed Abigail Smith was given the use of the west front room and
<br />the bedroom and attic above it, use of the fireplace, part of the cellar, the east end of the barn, 18 acres on the east side of the road, 2 acres on the west side, and an acre at the north end of the “upper pasture,” all valued at $1373.33. The court’s
<br />appointees determined that “the remainder can not be divided without prejudice to or spoiling the whole we therefor assigned the same to Joseph Smith eldest son of said deceased.”5
<br /> In October 1805 six of Joseph Smith’s children sold their shares of their father’s estate to their brother Joseph, then living in
<br />Weston, for $1200. This Joseph Smith died eight years later in Lexington, and his widow was left with three minor children. The administrator of her late husband’s estate then valued his real property, described as a good farm and buildings thereon in the
<br />south part of Lexington where the said Smith last lived” and containing 70 acres and buildings at $2695. Smith’s debts and other charges against the estate made it necessary to sell at least $1032.32 of the real property, and in January 1816 Susanna Dakin
<br />Smith sold the Allen Street farm, here again described as 120 acres (though parcels the estate administrator sold to others at the same time were excepted from the total) to Marshall Wellington at auction for $2450.6 In 1822 Amos Smith’s widow
<br />Catherine Langdon Smith of Boston released the mortgage claim to the property she had acquired when her husband died.7
<br />Marshall Wellington (1789-1866) was born in Waltham and was the son of William and Marty Whitney Wellington. In 1815 in Waltham he married in 1815 Elizabeth Kimball, and the 1820 and 1830 Lexington censuses clearly show him and his family in
<br />this part of Lexington. In 1837 Wellington sold his farm, described as 75 acres, to Galen Allen for $2000.8 Born in Acworth, New Hampshire, Galen Allen (1802-64) married Lavinia Munroe in Lexington two years after buying the Allen Street farm, and the
<br />1840 census lists him in this neighborhood with three persons in his household. The 1850 census credits Allen with $7,000 in real estate, and he lived at 29 Allen with his wife, four children (Harriet Augusta, Annette Ardell, John G. and Lavina M.), three
<br />farm workers, and an Irish immigrant domestic servant. The agricultural census schedules for 1850 list Allen with 50 improved and 80 unimproved acres, 19 cows, six other cattle, three pigs, and two horses. By 1855 the Allens had another child, Jonas,
<br />and boarded three farm workers. By 1860 Galen and Lavinia Allen lived with four of their children and four farm workers; the farm was valued at $9000 in the population census and $10,000 in the agricultural schedules.9 The farm was then 140 improved
<br />acres and 10 unimproved acres; Allen had 15 dairy cows and sold $1000 of milk the year before.
<br />When Galen Allen died in 1864 he had three minor children, and his widow Lavinia was “wasting away in consumption,” according to a letter submitted to the probate court; she had “not been able to sit up all day for three months, may live from three
<br />months to three years young—Her situation requires, I think, as liberal allowance as your limit will permit.” Allen owned his homestead farm—140 acres with the house, a wood shed, a carriage house, and a barn—estimated to be worth $7800 as well
<br /> 5 The widow’s share of the dwelling was described as the “west front room & chamber & garrett over the same to the center of the chimney except the front entry with liberty to pass & repass through the front entry out at the front door and up the front stairs into the chamber & garret and through the east room into the kitchin and use the fireplace and oven to wash, bake & brue(?) as she may have occasion for and to pass out at the kitching door and also pass out of said kitching into the cellar with the following priviledge in the cellar viz. from the north west corner from the south east corner of the arch under the back chimney to a post standing in the cellar being eleven feet from said corner thence west a strait line to the cellar wall being ten feet with liberty to pass and repass to and from the well and use the same also to pass and repass to & from the barn also the following part of the door yard viz from the west side of the door to a stake & stones forty feet front of the front door thence west to a peach tree marked thence north by a stone wall to a stake and stones then to the north west corner of the house thence south and east to the bound first mentioned with liberty to pass round the back part of said west end of the house to repair it.” The value of this share was estimated to be $158.66. 6 Susanna Smith to Marshall Wellington, 9 January 1816, MSD 216:35 and 216:37. 7 Catherine S. Smith, executor will Amos Smith, Boston, to Marshall Wellington, 27 November 1822, MSD 243:502.
<br />8 Marshall Wellington to Galen Allen, 17 April 1837, January 1838, MSD 364:97. 9 In 1860 148 farms were listed in Lexington, 22 of them worth between $10,000 and the highest value of $17,000.
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