[MassHistPres] Highfield on Brush Hill in Milton

[Dennis De Witt]

Over the last four years members of this list have helped identify about ⅔ of some 30 unidentified buildings in the BPL’s archive of the work of Wheelwright & Haven — contributing substantially to the double monograph on Arthur H. Vinal and Edmund March Wheelwright, the architects of the Chestnut Hill Pumping Station, which is now available in its 5th revised and expanded edition.

Recently, someone with a sharp eye spotted an ad selling a previously unknown Wheelwright house in Milton.  That lead to the identification of the “Half-butterfy plan” (or “suntrap plan”) house below as Highfield on Brush Hill in Milton, which Wheelwright’s built for Lewis A. Roberts in 1892-93.  (It is in Macris with no attribution as MLT-376)  upon completion it was immediately sold to Francis Peabody, Jr., who by 1905 added a substantial third rear wing — possibly but improbably a Library designed by Winslow & Bigelow exhibited in 1904, and a sunken formal garden designed by Rose Standish Nichols by 1910.  Later still the house was owned by E.M. Lowe, the flamboyant movie theater magnate.  Thus far, except for this one fuzzy aerial photo,    I have found no other photos of this house. It was demolished ca. 1990. There appears to be no formal archive for either Peabody or Lowe — nor Winslow & Bigelow — and the records of Rose Standish Nichols an important little known landscape architect, were thrown away in 1960 by her brother-in-law Arthur Shurcliff.  

I’m hoping perhaps someone on this list knows of a hidden family scrapbook or archive.

, 

Dennis J De Witt, Vice-Chairman
Metropolitan Waterworks Museum, Inc.
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