Built 1873 NRHP Reference # 82001949 Area 4,047 m² Architect Elinor Mead Howells | MPS Cambridge MRA Opened 1873 Added to NRHP 13 April 1982 | |
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Location Cambridge, Massachusetts Architectural style Second Empire architecture in Europe Similar Redtop, Lechmere Canal, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard Square, Cambridge Common | ||
The William Dean Howells House is a house built and occupied by American author William Dean Howells and family. It is located at 37 Concord Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house was designed by Howell's wife, Elinor Mead, and occupied by the family from 1873-1878. Authors including Mark Twain, Henry James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich visited the Howells in this house, as did President James Garfield, and Helen Keller lived there afterwards while attending school.
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History
As early as August 1872, William Dean Howells wrote to his brother-in-law that he had purchased land on Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts for 33 cents per square foot. The family moved into their new home there on July 7, 1873. Howells and his wife agreed it was "the prettiest house in Cambridge" and intended to live there for the rest of their lives.
The Howells family left the home in 1878, after which they moved to Redtop in Belmont, Massachusetts. By 1900, they had purchased a home near Gloucester, Massachusetts.
After the death of his wife Elinor Mead Howells in May 1910, Howells considered moving back to the Concord Avenue home with his daughter Mildred. Without Mrs. Howells, however, they found it "dreadful in its ghostliness and ghastliness" and, further, that the area had become noisy since the addition of two trolley lines nearby.
Before moving to the Concord Avenue house, the Howells family had lived, from 1866 to 1872, in a house (built in 1857) a few blocks north of Harvard University, at 41 Sacramento Street in Cambridge. Unlike the Concord Avenue house, the Sacramento Street house is not on the National Register of Historic Places, but does have a city of Cambridge historic landmark designation.
Recent history
In recent times, this house fell into very serious disrepair, but was in 2011 restored by a local historic-restoration-specialist builder, after consultations with the City of Cambridge Historical Commission.