Greenleaf Sanborn House and Timothy Hoxie House

Only two houses survive from the original Highland Place residential development on Parker Hill. Greenleaf Sanborn, a housewright, and Thomas Wait, a mason, hired Alexander Wadsworth to plat building lots in 1845. They sold lots with deed restrictions that forbade mechanic shops or other structures “objectionable to genteel buildings.” In 1848, Sanborn acquired for his own residence the Gothic Revival–style house at 139 Hillside Street, a popular L-shaped cottage plan with a bay window and entrance on the gable end facing the street and a porch on the ell.

In 1854 Sanborn sold his house to Reverend Andrew Stone, minister of the Park Street Church (BD2) in Boston. Stone moved from a house on Myrtle Street in Boston where his neighbor was Timothy Hoxie. Hoxie, a commission merchant in Boston, built an Italianate villa with a dramatic central tower on a lot on the opposite side of the street that afforded a better view of Boston. The Italianate ornamentation on the Hoxie House typifies the 1850s with large-scale window trim and brackets of boldly articulated molding profiles in imitation of the masonry trim. Boston architect Luther Briggs developed a series of designs for houses using this plan in a variety of architectural styles. As a surveyor in the initial 1845 development of Highland Place, he may have been Hoxie's architect.

By the 1880s, Mission Hill, as the area came to be known, began to be intensively developed for multifamily housing. The Timothy Hoxie House was moved across the street next to the Greenleaf Sanborn House and enlarged with an addition on the rear. At about the same time, the Sanborn House was brought forward on its lot.