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Mary Baker Eddy House (Peter Vanderwarker or Antonina Smith)
Maintained as a museum honoring its most historically important occupant, this house represents a typical example of middle-class housing built in Massachusetts during the 1860s and 1870s. With its narrow two-bay facade, side-hall entrance, steeply pitched gable roof, and pilasters supporting vestiges of cornice returns, the house demonstrates the persistence of Greek Revival models among contractors well into the last half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the ornamental trim, particularly the brackets supporting the window and door cornices and the bay window, derive from the more contemporary Italianate style.
After Lewis Newhall built the house, he rented it for a few years, and then sold it to Mrs. Mary Baker Glover in 1875. She lived here when the first edition of Science and Health was published in 1875 and when she married Asa Eddy in 1877. Mary Baker Eddy moved to Boston in 1882, and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Lynn bought the house in 1902. The Mother Church in Boston acquired the house in 1916. It has been restored and is open to the public as a museum honoring the founder of the First Church of Christ, Scientist. The house at 12 Broad Street represents one of the most popular vernacular housing types of the nineteenth century, the side-hall, two-bay, gable-end form.