The estates that Horatio Hollis Hunnewell created for himself and his children represent one of the most significant compounds of nineteenth-century architecture and landscape gardening in the Boston area. In 1836 Hunnewell married Isabella Welles, for whose family's banking business he was working in Paris. When the recession of 1837 forced the closing of Welles and Co. in Paris, the newlyweds returned to Boston and began to summer in a section of Needham, which would eventually become part of Wellesley. The Welleses had begun to acquire land on the shores of Lake Waban as early as 1763. In 1840, the Hunnewells took up residence at the Morrill House (c. 1775, 863 Washington Street) and began to improve the landscape of the family holdings, importing exotic and specimen trees and plants. The Hunnewells moved to an adjacent property in 1851 and during the second half of the nineteenth century developed country estates for seven of their children on adjacent properties in Wellesley and Natick.