Thomas Bailey Aldrich House
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Adam Thaxter House (Thomas Bailey Aldrich House)
1837, Edward Shaw. 59 Mount Vernon St.
Perhaps the best example of a Greek Revival town house on Beacon Hill, the Thaxter House follows the traditional Boston bowfront formula with carefully proportioned Greek Revival motifs. A maker of mathematical instruments, Thaxter hired as architect one of the country's leading authors of builder's guides, Edward Shaw. He wrote several books that went though multiple printings, Civil Architecture (1830), Operative Masonry (1832), Rural Architecture (1843), and The Modern Architect (1854). Shaw trained as a housewright in New Hampshire and in the Boston office of English-born architect Peter Banner, gaining practical skills and an understanding of historic architecture. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, editor of The Atlantic Monthly and author of the popular Story of a Bad Boy (1870), recounting his childhood in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lived here from 1890 until his death in 1907.
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Location: Boston, MassachusettsRegional Overviews:Architect:Types:Styles:Materials:no metadata available
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Citation
Keith N. Morgan, "Adam Thaxter House (Thomas Bailey Aldrich House)", [Boston, Massachusetts], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MA-01-BH19.
Print Source
Buildings of Massachusetts: Metropolitan Boston, Keith N. Morgan, with Richard M. Candee, Naomi Miller, Roger G. Reed, and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009, 109-109.
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