INVENTORY FORM CONTINUATION SHEET Community Property
Bolton Burnham Road
Coolidge/Burnham House
Massachusetts Historical Commission
Massachusetts Archives Building
220 Morrissey Boulevard
Boston, Massachusetts 02125 Area(s)
121; Form No.
222
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BY ANNE FORBES, CONSULTANT TO BOLTON HISTORICAL COMMISSION, MAY 1998:
ASSESSOR'S PARCEL: 5D-20, -21 ACREAGE: about 5 acres FILM ROLL/NEGATIVE: V-24, 25
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION, cont.
Since 1984 the property for the Coolidge/Burnham House has been reduced from twelve to about five acres. In spite of the presence of I-495 a short distance to the west, however, the immediate setting for the house--with grazing sheep, a barn across the road and two old maples in front, with woods to the rear--has a distinctly rural feeling. The house began as a four-bay, three-quarter Cape Cod cottage. According to Esther Whitcomb's later research, it was raised to two stories in 1887, leaving the original front cornice in place on the facade. A wing with a "saltbox" roof that bisects the northeast corner of the house was probably raised to its present two stories sometime after the rest of the house was enlarged. Abutting the northeast corner of the wing is a small modern gable-roofed screened porch.
Most of the windows in the main house are 6-over-9-sash, with flat, unadorned surrounds. A 2-over-2-sash remains in the south end; the wing has several multi-light casements, and a small 6-over-6-sash beside its modern glass-and-panel door. The door of the main house facade is a 6-panel type, in a simple, flat-board surround. A narrow brick chimney is placed off center at the main roof ridge; a second exterior chimney on the rear west wall of the wing would date to the twentieth century. The trim of the main house includes a molded, boxed cornice with carved consoles at the corners, and no returns on the gable ends. The cornerboards are wide, and a plain frieze board appears below both the lower and upper cornices. A modern brick terrace with a fieldstone retaining wall spans the front of the house.
On a separate parcel on the south side of Burnham Road facing the house are an early twentieth-century "drop-sided" one-car garage with a paneled door in the gable end, and a narrow gable-end barn (#222) of the second half of the nineteenth century. The barn has its high, vertical-board rolling wagon door in the west portion of the main gable end, and, like so many barns in Bolton, has a shed-roofed extension for stalls or stanchions that runs the length of the east side. The facade of the barn is shingled; its other sides are clad in board-and-batten siding. It stands on a fieldstone foundation.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE, cont.
Formerly known as the Burnham-Mechlin Farm, current research has resulted in a name change to the Coolidge/Burnham House.
William Coolidge, the first owner of this house, who apparently built it for himself and his wife as a small residence close to the house of his step-daughter and son-in-law just to the west (demolished), lived from 1758 to 1826. Although he had owned considerable property in Bolton, and had formerly farmed a large acreage at 374 Harvard Road (see Form #160), the property he bought from his son-in-law, Beriah Oak(s), Jr., was less than a quarter of an acre. As a veteran of the Revolutionary War he and his wife, Anna, lived on a small pension until his death. She inherited nearly all his property, including this house, which went to Mr. Coolidge's children, Daniel and Lydia, upon her death in 1847.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE, cont.
Her heirs sold the house to Philip Carnes, who resold it within two years, with several accompanying parcels on the north side of the road, to Lyman Balcom (1819-1895) who had recently married Electa Southwick, his second wife. At least two of their children would have been born in this house. In 1850 Mr. Balcom bought seven more acres, on the south side of the road.
In 1855, however, the Balcoms moved to the farm at 185 Hudson Road (see Form #146), and sold the property, with one acre around the house, the seven-acre parcel across the road, and several acres more, to Reuben Burnham, Jr. He is believed to have owned the property until he died, although the name "J. Burnham" is shown as the owner on the map of 1857. Reuben Burnham, Jr. was apparently a carpenter like his father, and may have built the barn still standing across the street. He was also the town mail carrier, a job which he was still performing when, at the age of 89 his carriage was involved in a collision with another vehicle.
The house was next acquired or inherited by Reuben E. Burnham, son of Reuben, Jr. and his wife, Lydia. At the turn of the century he was farming 26 acres here. He married Ida Fairbanks, and they had one daughter, Myra, who married Arthur J. Whitcomb.
In about 1925, Reuben and Lydia moved to Gleasondale in Stow, and sold the farm to Raymond Wetherbee, who remodeled one of the barns for raising chickens. Mr. Wetherbee died sometime around the middle of this century, and his widow, Susan Wetherbee Paine eventually sold the place to Robert Mechlin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Maps and atlases: 1831 (Wid. Coolidge); 1857 (J. Burnham); 1870 (R. Burnham, Jr.); 1898 (R. Burnham).
Whitcomb, E. About Bolton, 1988.
"The Burnham House, 121 Burnham Road". n.d.
Bolton street directories (in The Hudson Directory).
Bolton Vital Records; cemetery records.
[ ] Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
If checked, you must attach completed National Register Criteria Statement form is attached.
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