 At this point I'd like to introduce our speaker, Marianne Adams. She's retired from the university, but she's gotten much more involved in the topic of today, our North Prospect Lincoln Sunset Local Historical District, which is a fascinating area. And I'm sure you'll be interested in hearing what she has to say. I'm going to turn it over to Marianne. First of all, can you hear me if I do my kind of classroom voice and try to? And if you can, then I will use a mic, but it's a bit uncomfortable. So just raise your hand if you don't hear me. As heavy as one does after years at the university, there are lots of handouts there. If you want to take any with you, they have the historical information, they have pictorial information, so that if you want information about that, the only thing I ask, not that is the book, because that's the only copy I have. Otherwise I have lots of copies. And I also want to give a shout out to Cindy, because Cindy was up there in the Jones archives. And Susanna Faden, who is here, the member of the study committee, and Ed Wilford, who is here somewhere, and Bill Gillen, who is somewhere around here. And I, and many others, really presumed on her hospitality, to pull out the tax records, to which street directory should we go to. I mean, this was, let me tell you, a fascinating research job, and it felt to me at least like my second dissertation. It was like sitting in the British Museum and having books brought to them. And Cindy was certainly up to that level, so I don't know if I said this. And I also want to say that this was very much a cooperative team effort. It ended up that we did 197 properties. Did means you go look at the house, you inspect whether it's built on brick or concrete or stone, you see what the siding is, you go into the records, you go on to ancestry.com. If somebody has come from Ireland or come from some other place and you wanna see the kind of lineage or if you wanna check if people are family members living in different parts of the district, it was quite a bit of fascinating research. And I think that we really helped each other. We could not have done it without each other. And I should say, finally, that we really did have community support. We only did this because this community recognized its historical, it's complicated historical value and wanted to document that and to preserve that. So there was tremendous community support for the work that we were doing. So mass Aggie isn't a terribly respectful term to use, but it really was the term of the time. It was the Massachusetts Agricultural College that was up at the North and the Amherst Business Center was essentially the intersection of Amity and Pleasant Street. And most of the development prior to the time that I'm talking about was on the Amherst College South side of that intersection. I have there for you and it's also on a handout. In case you wanna go online, it's the study committee that really has the interesting documentation for this. So you will find some of it in a local historic district commission part of the town website. But the study committee, we asked that that be kept up because there's so much more resource material there. Okay, so just a little bit of an agenda. We're gonna look at some maps. We're gonna look at some factors in the development of the housing north of Amity. We're gonna look at some of the architectural styles. We'll think about some of the notable residents. And then at the end, for those of you who are interested, there's a very important regulatory context for all of this. So that this really has legal standing and that's part of why we, why it was important that we do it right and it was also important that we do it. So this is the map and I'll come back to this several times and you may want to ask later on why some of the lines are so jagged. We'll talk about those later. I don't want to get at this point into the politics of creating a local historic district. The support of the residents and leaving out the people who would prefer that we not do that. And it's also very important because many of you know this. Some of you sitting here are residents of National Historic District homes. I think in this town, that was happening in the 1990s. The houses that are in the National Registry tend to be the older, more splendid houses. They're associated with people who are well known or incidents who are well known. And the interesting direction that social history is moving in is toward a broader demographic and multicultural, cross-racial, cross-economic history of towns. And that was really the direction that we were wanting to go in. It's also the case that National Registry is a great honor and you get a beautiful plaque and a very nice book. But your homes really are not protected the way they are by the regulatory power of the local historic districts in Massachusetts. And I'll get back to that as time permits. So the factors in the emergence of this particular area. I noted that really up to about the Civil War, Amity and Pleasant were the centers of town activity and the Amherst College was really the big deal in town. And several things happened at that time and subsequent. The 1853 Amherst-Belcherton Railway brought a number of new folks into Amherst. I haven't yet to figure out, and maybe Ed will add to this later on. I'm not quite sure what Belchertown connected to. In other words, how did the Irish get from Ireland to Boston to Belchertown to Amherst? They did somehow. But the railroad was a very important factor in 1853. And in 1863, the founding of Massachusetts Agricultural College was extremely important. So that the already existing commercial success of the town, the new opportunities presented by the university, the railroad brought about significant population expansion and economic diversity. And for our neighborhood, this mainly had to do with immigrants who came directly from Ireland, brought their families and then their families followed them, as well as a significant Northward movement post Civil War of African Americans, as well as free African Americans, already free, who came down from Vermont and elsewhere where they were had been farming. So that this was an interesting place for a very rich mixture of peoples of color, as well as peoples of different ethnicity, really living cheek to jowl. One of the factors for the Irish was the building of St. Brigid's, which was unpleasant. And once a black population had been established on McClellan and Besten and Page, they under the leadership of Moses Goodwin and several others established the Goodwin AME Zion Church. And I guess I could say in fairness, these were African Americans who did not wanna go over to the black church that had been established by Amherst College. They had a different style of worship and they created their own context for worship. So that to the north of the established part of town had mainly been farmland. There was the Henderson farm in the fearing area, the Kohl's farm, which becomes a street sign note up there and the Cutler farm, which becomes the Lincoln and Sunset. And there's an intermediary set of sales that would be impossible for me to track in a single slide here of sales and resales for development, to Hills, Westcott, Fearing, Mater, et cetera and et cetera, who then cut them into smaller and smaller lots, which were then bought by the new Irish and Black residents who had essentially crowded into rentals on Pleasant Street but then began building homes in what is now this LHD. So this gives you some pictorial sense of the changes in 1873 you could still write people's names on a map. By the time you get much later on, 1941, and I'm not going to be going that far, in 1971 we have numerous dots and I'll be showing you some other dot maps later on. So when we look at this expansion to the north and the west from Amity Street, McClellan and Besten were mainly built up by Irish tailors starting with John Besten, builders, laborers, carpenters and factory workers, living next door to African-Americans who were skilled craftsmen, cooks, domestic workers and maintenance staff at either at Mass Aggie or at dormitories for students where they provided the cooking and the care. That was a slightly different history from Page Street where that piece parcel of land was bought by Frank Page who had a livery stable and sold or gave for, and the records are not clear, lots to his livery workers and other workforce who were again Irish and black and that was a street that had a large number of African-Americans and those houses were essentially built in one year between 1888 and 1889. The North Prospect homes have a larger, longer history and a more economically diverse ownership. There was a drugist, a shoe dealer, photographer, a cabinet maker, there are also developers, the woman Emily Williams who developed some lots on Besten Street for Irish immigrants herself bought her own home on North Prospect Street. Lincoln Avenue starts a bit later and goes on longer. And it's, they're larger houses as you all know, built for professionals, merchants, bankers, et cetera. Really from the 1880s, although there are some earlier houses into the 1930s. And Fearing Street from the Fearing Estate, there are houses as early as 1870, 1890 and 1920s on with a similar class ownership to Lincoln Avenue and the Sunset Street where there were a few in the 1870s, 1890s, but mainly 1910 and on. Cosby interestingly, like Page Street, was a one or two year development built at the end of this building period, mainly for the large number of faculty and associated staff who were coming to Mass Agricultural and needed a place to live. And so that's also a reason why the architecture is so interestingly diverse, although clumped architecturally in the neighborhood. Okay. I love these dots because I forget who did this for us, but you'll see the clumping of red dots if you point your, I don't know if anybody can go point, but you can see Kendrick Place there, that kind of triangle toward the middle left. And if you go to the left of Kendrick Place, you see all the red dots. And those red dots show the vintage of these houses as being earlier from the 1860s to the 1880s, 90s, then the yellow dots, which are a bit later. Here we, I knew I had a slide that had the numbers. So the red dots are essentially from 1800 to 1899, but they're really from 1860s, 1873 to 1899. The yellow dots are more, not so much up to 1949. A lot of the building stops at the end of the 30s for obvious reasons, we're in a depression beginning to enter a war, and then there is a buildup later on elsewhere in Amherst to suit other residential needs. So the characteristic of this particular neighborhood is it does reflect, I think, the demographic, cultural, economic development, and diversity of a post-Civil War pre-World War II period where there is already a certain amount of commerce in manufacturing, you know the hat factory, which changed hands, there's home industry, then there's the faculty housing, which had already happened for Amherst College. The railroad brings in new residents. It's also, the railroad is very good for the factory because it can transport industrial products outside of Amherst. But most important for our purposes here is the increase in population and demographic change. It's, I don't know if I have this on another slide, so I'll say right now, that it's fascinating to us when we've looked at the stories of the people who came here from Ireland, for example. There are so many tailors who are hired by Mr. Pease, who lived over on Pease Place. McClellan Street is full of tailors. Most of the Irish are tailors. The Irish on Bestein Street are seamstresses. And there really isn't a lot of interconnection there. So that the seamstresses, the Bestein daughters, tie up with the powers who will over over North Prospect Street to create a very prosperous business so that their mother, Mary Bestein, moves down to Lincoln Avenue and has a house built by Putnam, one of the prominent architects in town. So that gives you a sense of some of the interaction in the neighborhood. I've mentioned the class mixture, but it's interesting that Labour's artisan servants and chauffeurs lived in very close proximity with the merchants, professors, and professionals, who they worked for largely on Lincoln Avenue, Sunset, or over on Fearing. And in fact, in a late life interview, the youngest Goodwin daughter remembered that many of the chauffeurs who drove for Lincoln Avenue and Sunset residents bought their own houses on McLean. So that becomes an interesting connection as well. A number of the Irish and a number of the African-Americans were self-employed. They provided neighborhood services, they were builders, roofers, janitors, and they also worked for the existing businesses, the half factory, the laundry. They were local builders. John Britt was one of the early builders. There are generations of Brits, as you know, still here in Amherst, but John Britt came as a skilled stone worker from Ireland and had a lot of business with all of the building that was taking place at that time. And what was very important to us, what really made this project possible, is that most of these houses remain today very much the way they were originally. I mean, we've added decks and we've put awnings and we've maybe changed the roof, but if you walk down these streets and have in front of you a few of the pages of what the houses look like, you can see the original bones of the houses. They have not been changed. Now, there was a lot of, how do I put this? There was not racial interaction religiously. Nor was there Protestant-Catholic interaction religiously. The Catholics went to St. Richards, which was on Pleasant Street. The African Americans living in our neighborhood founded, dug the holes for, raised the money for, and built the AME Zion, which was not in the immediate neighborhood, it was just a few blocks over to the south. And then the Protestants in the neighborhood went to the established Protestant churches that already existed. Families intermarried within Irish, within Black, within Protestant. But aside from those elements of separation, there was tremendous interaction. African Americans who owned a home would rent a floor to an immigrant Irish family. Irish families who owned a home would rent rooms to Black families just up from the south or down from the north. So for example, in McClellan, the house that both John Brits live in was owned for a very long time by Moses Goodwin, who gave his name to the AME Zion Church. But the Goodwins had originally rented from the Brits who used to live next door. So there is residential, you can't even call it integration because it never wasn't that. Everybody was in the same situation financially and everyone was helping each other out. And you really get this from the stories that they talk about, the neighborhoods. So I've given you the build dates so that you can see the emergence of the neighborhoods, the essential build dates, you can see that in the red on the top. And they are very eclectic architecturally, although the working-class homes, and I'll show you this shortly, of Besten and McClellan really adhere to what I call a farmhouse vernacular, it could be called a Victorian vernacular, whereas there is much more architectural differentiation in some of the other houses. And this is the list of terms we would use as we identify different houses. This is the sort of thing that Susanna Fabian was excellent at and told us, which was which, whereas others of us kind of specialized in terms of our own expertise. But one thing that was very characteristic was these homes were set back from the sidewalk. There was a greenway in front between the sidewalk and the house. There were broad lawns, there were mature deciduous trees, and there were side or back yards with lawns and gardens. And this is still the case. The vernacular farmhouses, I'm gonna have to call them anonymous because we really don't know who built one, except it's interesting to see how similar the style is. Whereas the local architects, both Roswell and Karl Butler and Bailey, Burnett, gas are named builders of some of the houses on Lincoln, Sunset and Fearing. And as I mentioned, Britt was a local stonemaser and builder. Best John Besten was a builder. So now we're gonna look at some of the architectural range. This will be fairly brief. So we start with the boatwood house, which obviously wildly preceded our efforts, which is still there and is clearly the oldest house in the neighborhood. And here on Besten Street, we have a resident sitting amongst us. She kept the house intact and made it, would we say, how would we call that? What's it, where are you? Deep energy retrofit. Deep energy retrofit. No roof, but you didn't change the house. No, all the interior and all the lines are the same, I did add eight feet to the rear so I could get to the cellar. But everything else is changed. I stripped it down to the board sheathing and built it out with super insulation on the walls and in the roof, there's a foot insulated panels on the roof, so it's slightly bigger because it expanded on the outside but the inside is still the same. So it shows you the basic bones of the farmhouse vernacular with the entry on the left, two windows over the two lower windows in the bay, and the two houses on each side that they're not shown in this picture are identical although they have changed slightly. And you see, I mean this we now call by a more elaborate term, but you can see some of the elaboration of an older design with a side bay entrance to windows to the side. It's obviously a three story house, it's a much more prosperous house. However, it is the same vintage 1865 and it's on North Prospect Street because there is a greater variety, both chronologically and of styles and of economic classes on North Prospect. This is interesting because you essentially have two houses fairly similar to this one built together as a duplex or double so that the two entrance bays are right next to each other with the bays to left and right. And I just thought that would be it's still that way, that's the way it was built in that 1895. The Mason Dickinson house, 1893 is a quite lovely house on and gives you again some of the variety and Mason had the house across the street. I'm not sure if I have that, yes. He had the house built for his son in a different style in 1922. They're right across the street from each other. Sunset Avenue, the William Burnett house, it's a very elaborate house for 1897. Again, if you go online to the study committee materials and click on resources, you will get the whole family ownership history of all these houses. And let me tell you, it is fascinating. It's quite a read. Okay, so notable houses. So I start with Moses and Anna Goodwin. Anna was Ma Goodwin and she ran a dormitory for mass agricultural students when Moses, that was his second marriage, had gotten very busy with building the church, raising the money for it. He was a machinist who had been trained, as I recall, and I don't trust my memory, but I think he had been trained at the Hills Path Factory, went into private business and supported himself with his own machinist shop while seeing to the building of the AME Zion church. And across the street from him at 50 MacBellan lived Minnie Hall, who then married Anderson, who was living next door. She was so active in the AME Zion that she was given the honor of doing the first spade into the dirt to kind of get the thing built. This is the kind of a lovely portrait done by the children of one of the families whom she worked for. Again, she has quite a history. If I went into her history, we'd run out of time. I know I'm running out of time anyway. This is the Minnie Hall Anderson house at 50 MacBellan. And you see, again, out of the differences in architecture, this is... This is the story I'm here for questions. Oh, sorry, yes. Note that that house has been radically changed in its design to be a bungalow house. Yes. It did not look like that when Minnie was there. So when Minnie was there, was it essentially farmhouse from that door? Probably. The roof line has been changed in that front porch. So it looks very much out of its period. Okay, thank you for correcting me on that. I count on Ed Wilford to do that. And Ed knows that by crawling around basements. But with this case, paddock. Okay, yes. So it wasn't just the archives. Okay. And the 76th Fearing Street house I have there, because Dartmouth-Avenson is well known to us, but I would say, Ed, that that's also architecturally an anomaly? Yes, no? Give it a thought and tell us later. Okay. Both Eugene Field and Mary Heaton-Vorst live there. Mary Heaton-Vorst was a well-known feminist. Eugene Field, you know his poetry. And you know the house, which now has a very large parking lot with a number of rental cars. Oh, what things descend to. And we have no idea what the stern-looking Mr. Baker, the author David Grayson, would think of his house may be an outing of fraternity has. But you see, at least architecturally, it's still there. On the 259 Lincoln house, it was a, we call it the Norton-Jester house. Now Steve Bloom and Jen Paul live there. Very lovely. And Lucy Wilson Benson, who was the first female undersecretary of state, I believe, under Roosevelt. No. No? Carter. Carter, thank you. I knew someone would have a right answer. Carter. Okay. Okay, yes, I've added too many years to her age. It's not fair. Okay. Is on sunset. And Robert Frost didn't live there that long. I mean, it has nothing on the Dickinson house, but he did live there. And he got a good deal on it from, I think, the person who was the president of UMass at the time. Yes, Susanna did, I guess. He got a very good deal on it. So he was just there a few years, yes. That house, without having been moved, was originally part of Lincoln's street. Okay. Now Lincoln Avenue. And when Sunset Avenue was built, since it sat so back far from Lincoln Street, or Lincoln Avenue, it became. Yes. So the address changed. Yes. The street address changed, but the house remained. And the property goes through. Everything changes around it, but the house is as it was. I can get a question. Yes. Was the entrance to that house then on Lincoln? It was set back from Lincoln. So that's the entrance, because I know that house is the entrance from the side of the street. Is it the same front door? Pardon? Is it the same front door? I didn't study that house as much because a lot of people have. Yes. Okay. Questions that remain to be investigated. So you don't really know how it's been changed. As you can see, one answer leads to another question. So that's the way this evolves. Okay. Let me just spend a few moments on this. I don't want to go into this in detail. But in 1960, Massachusetts passed a historical commission approval process that would not only honor historically interesting neighborhoods and houses, but also protect them. So that the purpose was to preserve and protect, to maintain the settings, to encourage the new designs and materials, and that is really part of the legislation. And as of 2003, there are 120 cities in Massachusetts. In Amherst, our first one was the Dickinson LHD. And this map, but that's, there's a hand out of that in the back as well, shows you, you know, we're not surprised that they're so clustered to the east. But we are showing greater recognition of what we have in the west of the state as well. So we have four major elements, once following the Massachusetts guidelines for the Amherst local historic district, which was passed in 2012 when the Dickinson Historical District was the first of our historical district. And so it was essentially those criteria, including contiguous boundaries. So we weren't gonna have one house here, one house there, one house somewhere else. These had to be contiguous. And we were really looking at the historical integrity of the fabric. And it was essential that the owners should desire LHD protections, which accounts for some of the jagged lines of our borders. And we did the best we could to reach out to everyone to see, is this okay with you? It prevents a demolition without adequate review. It really looks at renovations and new structure in the context of the neighborhood. And it encourages creative new design that's consistent in size dimension scale with other buildings in the neighborhood. And so we also passed, back in 2005, there's been an annual preservation plan, which made some of these points but to have to get set up a local historic district by law. And it's, you can read this for yourselves. An explanation, it's exterior. It really focuses on the exterior visible from a public way. We do not look at interiors. Certain elements are exempt. We're delighted with solar panels. We don't require that you maintain properties. And it doesn't prevent new building development or rental conversions. In other words, we can't legislate what goes on inside. What we regulate is what it looks like from the outside. And then, you know, I hope I don't need to convince you that some of these slides were slides we made for town meeting and before that for planning board and, you know, other groups who we wanted to point out that this was the people with a master plan. And there we are for further resources which you already got. Oh yes, we had some trouble with some people getting onto it. So Chrome or Firefox, we gave you there onto the backup. And a shout out to our hardworking study committee members and our hardworking student interns and our hardworking town staff. And we really should have Cindy on there too because we bothered her as much as we bothered anybody else. I thought she would just as I closed, like to see what Kendrick Carplot used to look like. I'm sure lots of you know how because they were moved from there to somewhere else. And I thought you might like to see what St. Bridget's used to look like. And that's the end of my story. Oh yes, the Amherst Belcher Town Broadway became the Amherst Belcher Town Palmer Railway very quickly. And that was succeeded by the New London, Northern, New London, Northern, any kind of the railway that went all the way from the London, Connecticut north. And after the Civil War was over, it was no longer dead ended at Amherst but went north to Vermont and Connecticut. Which would be a reason why some African American families came from farmland to the north and came down, yes. And the other thing about the railway is that the railroad not only brought people that brought coal up to that time. Amherst was powered by water and wood. If you look at the chimneys of houses built in the late 1860s and 70s, the chimneys are smaller, they're for coal burning, they're not for wood burning. And so, for example, the houses on Westwood Street. Yes, exactly, yes. When did the neighborhood become less the first? As families grew up and moved away. So the Goodwin family was there until the death of Bruce. 19, I don't remember the date. One of the projects that I would want to do and have not, I would want to be able to trace the Till family, the Bateman family, the Hasbrook family. I think probably a place to start would be at AME, Zion Church, and to see if there are descendants of people who knew the descendants. Because it is true that if we hadn't had this history, we'd have no idea. Because that's not the way the neighborhoods are now. So what happened? Penny John did quite well. The Penny John started with Liberty Stable on page. He moved in John Beston's house to the end of Beston. He then bought one of the Kendrick Park houses and moved it through Britt's lawn. I have heard from Britt to the objection of Britt's wife. He hold it through the lawn. So it's now 15 Beston Street, looking as if it had always been there, but it hadn't. So he owned both of those houses. That meant he had a rental, and he also had a roofing business. So he did very well. But I haven't tracked down the Penny John project. So, I mean, this all raises more questions. The more answers we get, the more questions we get. That's a very important question. A number of the Irish family had left too. Daughters went to secretario school. They went then, got jobs in Boston, became teachers somewhere else. In the case with Goodwoods, there are different houses in Amherst associated with the Goodwoods. Moses rented a house. Next door. The house, is it the corner house? Well, the house that he bought is the corner house. The horse that he rented is a much smaller house immediately next door. He rented. He got married and moved to Short Street off of my old house. So he lived several years. Anyhow, he married and lived there. Yes. That wife died. Yes. And so in that second marriage, he moved back right next door to the house that he had rented. Yes. On the corner house. And he owns that house. And he owns that house. And eventually she had a house. Yes. And her goals. And the business of more questions. Other questions? I was fascinated to find that on a number of occasions, widows would move to Amherst by a house while their sons went to Amherst College. And then either sell the house and move back to where it came from or rent it out to students or that kind of thing. I mean, this was happening way back in the 1880s. Oh, it needs to be a helicopter carrier. Probably before the revolution in our city. Deppard Shepherd, as widow comes to Amherst to put her two sons through Amherst College or daughter of Mary's, Lucius Bultwood. They're related to the Amherstons. This is the 1820s. South Prospect Street was Shepherd's Lane. 1850, Mrs. Emerson bought the strong house while her son was in Amherst College. And before she got, before they moved to the strong house, they were living in Deppard Shepherd's house because she had died and the strong house was not available yet. That is an interesting social construct rather to follow the sun. But as so many other things in Amherst in the 19th century, it's family connections. Certainly did have an investment theory. Yes. But they were Irish. Yes, we had several generations of the Gallans and it was also the case. I mean, they all had the same first names. They were all John and Mary. So they're trying to figure out with ancestry and other tools, who was living with whom where or had moved away really became quite a mind-bender. Well, let's thank Mary. Thank you.