Andrew Oliver–Charles Sargent–Steven Thayer House (Homelands)

Situated at the end of a long, maple-lined drive with fine views across open fields to Nannaquacket Pond, Homelands is a superbly evolved country seat. Andrew Oliver, a stamp tax collector, built this substantial two-and-one-half-story gambrel-roofed house and lost it to confiscation during the Revolutionary War. During the latter nineteenth century, it became the summer house of Charles Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum, who married into the wealthy Fall River textile family which had owned it from 1867 and developed it as a gentleman's dairy farm. Sargent planted many specimen trees on the property. His daughter, Mrs. Steven Van Renssalaer Thayer, continued to operate the dairy farm and engaged Boston architect A. W. Longfellow to remodel the house in 1890 in what was one of the earlier Colonial Revival reworkings of an eighteenth-century farmhouse into a country retreat. Although some outbuildings remain from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominating replacement barn (1890) burned in the 1980s.