marrett-road_0271 Enhanced Building Form

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INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET LEXINGTON 271 MARRETT ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 LEX.586 Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form. ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION: Based on fieldwork by Walter R. Wheeler & Neil Larson, 2021 The main section of the Jonas & Susannah Bridge House was built in the 1790s on land owned by the Bridge family since the mid-17th century. It would have been predated by an earlier dwelling. It has a two-story hall-parlor plan with a center passage; the rooms have chimneys centered on their rear (north) walls. There likely was a lean-to containing a kitchen, at least on west side of the house. It has a five-bay front façade facing south with a center entrance in a simple surround capped by a thin cornice in a Neoclassical manner. It appears that the sash within the array of windows around it, also in minimal frames, once were six-over-six in pattern, but early on were made to be three-over-three with the removal of medial muntins. There is a shallow cornice at the eave line with a frieze interrupted by the window heads in characteristic 18th-century fashion. A piazza was built across the entire façade later in the 1800s and has since been removed; the doorway may have been reconstructed at this time. The eaves on the gable ends are tight against the walls, and each has single windows centered on all three stories. A two-story gable-roof wing with a façade about as wide as the main house is engaged to the rear corner of the west end of the house. It has a ruder and potentially older timber frame than the house and may have functioned as an outbuilding before being adapted for use as a kitchen. It has a two-room plan with a cooking hearth in the room closest to the house. Each section has two windows on both stories on the façade; a door is awkwardly squeezed in the corner where the two buildings are joined. It opens on a small lobby with doors into the house and the wing and access to a staircase. Another door was located at the other end of the façade, but it was replaced with a window. A one-story extension is attached to the west end of the kitchen wing. It contains an early garage now fronted by three conjoined windows where a vehicle door once was and a later garage with an arched opening with swing doors. Later in the 19th century a large two-story wing with a flat roof was added to the rear of the main house obliterating any annex that it may have replaced. It partially wraps around the rear of the kitchen wing and a piazza spans the entire north elevation (substantially rebuilt in 1929 with square posts and turned balusters apparently salvaged from the original). Fenestration is varied and from a mix of period alterations. At some later date, a two-story, one-room-plan wing with fireplaces was constructed against the east side of this massive addition. It seems to have been intended to function independent of the house. Accounts repeated in many 20th-century historical sources assert that the two-story wing that extends from the west gable end of the main block of the house represents a 17th century dwelling built for Matthew Bridge. This interpretation is questionable for at least two reasons. First, the configuration of the frame of the wing is more akin to that of a kitchen wing, or perhaps an outbuilding, rather than a dwelling. Second, the high level of oxidation of most of the framing members—now exposed, but previously (perhaps by the early 19th century) covered with lath and plaster—is a strong indication of a long period during which these structural components were initially exposed before being covered in the 19th century, and thus unlikely to have formed part of a domestic space. A more likely scenario is that the original house on the property had this wing added to it, and at a later date, ca. 1800, the original house was demolished and replaced with a five-bay wide house with center passage with the wing retained and possibly remodeled for domestic use at that time. Dendrochronological analysis of beams would help determine the construction date of the building. A 1969 newspaper article about the house noted that in “pulling up the floorboards in the attic, they [the owners] discovered that two mainbeams [sic] in both bedrooms were stained and champhered [sic]. At the top of the attic stairs a whole partition turned out to be panelling covered with wallpaper of the 1700’s.”1 These beams are not presently available for inspection, but the finishes on exposed girts and posts in the east bedchamber (the summer beam is encased in a modern finish) do not support an early construction date. 1 Anne R. Scigliano, “The Old House”—Memorial to the Past,” Lexington Minute-Man, 16 October 1969.