Buildings by Harry B. Little

Architect Harry Little executed seventeen commissions from the 1910s to the 1940s that extended and reinforced Colonial Revival as an appropriate style for buildings in Concord. Little was nationally recognized as a Gothic Revival church architect, best known for his work on the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., with the firm of Frohman, Robb and Little. He came to live in Concord in 1914, designing his own house, Littleholme, a substantial clap-boarded Colonial Revival residence at 263 Simon Willard Road, the first of five domestic commissions in the town. In 1924, the Trinitarian Congregational Church burned, and the congregation commissioned Little to design its replacement (NRD) at 54 Walden Street. Restricted to the foundations of the previous 1826 meetinghouse, Little raised a wooden church dominated by a telescoping tower and steeple in the manner of the early nineteenth century. Little designed the town's two libraries, the modest brick hipped-roof Fowler Memorial Library in West Concord (1930) and the Concord Free Public Library (1934) at 129 Main Street, where he encased an 1873 library by Snell and Gregerson within Georgian brick detailing fronted by a limestone column screen. Nearby at 64 Main Street, he designed the Middlesex Institutions for Savings (1932), a temple-form building that repeats the massing and image of the Concord Bank (1832) at 46–48 Main Street; both sympathetically frame the intervening Concord National Bank (1894–1895, Willard Frost) at 52 Main Street. For the Concord Anti-quarian Society, founded in 1886, Little worked with the society's Vice President Russell Kettell to design the brick and concrete Concord Museum (NRD) at 200 Lexington Road to house a series of period rooms and the collection of Americana begun by Cummings E. Davis. The continuing viability of the Colonial Revival style for the museum influenced the 1980 barnlike education building by Lannie Day and the 1991 brick addition by Graham Gund Architects that serves as the entrance to the museum and includes a theater and changing exhibition galleries.