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ARCHITECTURAL SIGNIFICANCE (Describe important architectural features and evaluate in terms of other buildings within the community.) This house is now a substantial structure with heavily proportioned Greek Revival decorative features: frontispieces on the south and west sides with panelled pilasters and entablatures with broad frieze and large dentils, panelled corner pilasters, slim frieze boards and a course of large dentils at the eaves. whether or not the house incorporates the 1730 structure known to have been on this site is uncertain. The five-bay-wide south elevation could have been the facade of a Second Period house that received a new roof with ridge (see Continuation Sheet) HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE (Explain the role owners played in local or state history and how the building relates to the development of the community.) This property was part of the acreage amassed by the Bridge family, original seventeenth-century proprietors of Lexington, then "Cambridge Farms." Before his death in 1738 Matthew Bridge, Jr. had given a house and 100 acres of farmland to each of his four sons (see 271 Marrett Road form for a fuller account of the Bridge family) . Third son, John Bridge (b. 1700, d. 1776) received the house on this site, built very likely at the time of his first marriage in 1730. John Bridge served as selectman and town treasurer. His son, John, who presumably resided on this site, was one of the foremost citizens of his time in Lexington. He served in the army in the 1750s, was a member of Captain Parker's company of Minute Men on the Common on April 19, 1775, served with the Lexington Minute Men in Cambridge and at Bunker Hill, and when Captain Parker died, Bridge became captain. Bridge led the Lexington Minute Men to duty in Roxbury and later became a major in the militia. He served as a member of the Committee of Correspondence and Safety in 1776 and was after the war a magistrate and justice of the peace and assessor. A large dairy farm was operated here in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1899 Joseph M. Middleby ran the Reservoir Stock Farm here. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES (name of publication, author, date and publisher) Hudson, Charles. History of the Town of Lexington, revised and continued to 1912 by the Lexington Historical Society, Volume II, p. 56. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913. Worthen, Edwin B. , Jr. "The Bridge Family and Lexington. " Written for the use of the Lexington School Committee, 1964. 1853 map 1875 atlas 1889 atlas 1898 atlas 1906 atlas 1899 Directory 1906 Directory 10M - 7/82