No. 6072 12 Alban Street, photograph April 18, 2005
Date of construction: 1890
Architect: Edwin J. Lewis, Jr.
In the appendix to The Second Settlement Tucci cites a mention in AA Sept 6, 1890 – architect Edwin J. Lewis, Jr., builder M. C. Bronwell, S.E.W. Smith owner
Atlas 1894 shows owner as Sarah E. W. Smith
She owned the three houses at 128 Ashmont Street, 12 Alban Street and 14 Alban Street, so I don’t know for sure which of the two houses on Alban Street she lived in.
The following is from Ashmont by Douglass Shand-Tucci, p. 101-103.
The Smith House, 12 Alban, is no less a carefully considered work of art than In the Orchard [by Edmund Tarbell who lived at number 14]. Like Tarbell’s painting, which was important to his career in signaling his serious interest in the French Impressionists, the Smith House declared clearly one of Lewis’s chief sources of inspiration, for in its plan and unadorned shingled gambrel profile and overall informality of plan and mass, 12 Alban directly recalls the seventeenth-century Fairbanks House in Dedham, then Dorchester’s neighbor when the town was much larger (indeed, part of Dedham was set off from Dorchester Township in 1739. This is all surely a reflection among other things of the antiquarian interests Lewis shared with Herbert Carruth (both were closely involved with the Dorchester Historical Society at the highest level). Just as the leading developers of these houses sought to preserve in the landscape Ashmont’s early and mid-nineteenth-century horticultural tradition, so also Lewis, the area’s most influential architect, rooted the visual image of Ashmont’s new houses in the town’s seventeenth-century past. It was an Arts and Crafts idea, after all, to be indigenous and vernacular.
Charles and Sarah Smith commissioned 12 Alban in 1890. Smith, who had risen from an apprenticeship at age fifteen to become the sole partner in Capen, Sprague and Company, 8 Custom House Street, was a leading force in his day in the Boston Chamber of Commerce and, according to this Dorchester Beacon obituary, was “well known in literary, art [my italics], musical and financial circles.” Yet at 12 Alban, as in so many houses by Lewis, one is again somewhat surprised that such ambitious and successful clients did not find their domestic idyll either in elaborate Queen Anne-style towers or the splendiferous Georgian Revival pomps that by 1890 were increasingly the architecture of choice in such situations. Twelve Alban, for all its design distinction an understated and quite unpretentious house, signals the fact that Lewis (and Smith) likely shared the ideas put forward by Cobb and Stevens (whom Lewis may well have known) a year before 12 Alban was built in the Examples of American Domestic Architecture of 1889 (the Ashmont plate of which is the frontispiece of this bok). Cobb and Stevens inveighed very much against what today we would call “conspicuous consumption” and strongly urged the merits of understated houses; for the architects concerned, they wrote , such houses “bespoke elegantly their client’s self-image and his quiet, assured place in society.” Thus there is a specific taste as well as a specific history in Lewis’s 12 Alban.
On the other hand, the Smith House was also, as a building type, a radically new thing in its time. All these houses were. For although the evolution from the 180s to the 1860s, from London’s Regents Park to the full-fledged garden suburb, is too lengthy a process to trace here, it must be remembered that Llewellyn Park in New Jersey, generally thought to be the first American romantic suburb (roughly contemporaneous with Longwood in Brookline in the Boston area) was begun in 1857, eight years after Ashmont Street was laid out in 1849, and only twelve years before the laying out of Carruth Street in 1869. Moreover, when Ashmont’s subdivisions appeared in 1871 on both sides of the square, there were themselves contemporaneous with the design of such landmark American romantic suburbs as Riverside, Illinois, near Chicago (by Olmsted, Vaux and Company in 1869-1871), the significance of which John Archer points out in the May 1982 volume of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. At Riverside, writes Professor Archer, “what had only been implicit in the design of Regent’s Park two generations — a desire to combine the amenities of country and city — now had been transformed into an explicit principle on which Riverside and other American romantic suburbs were built.”
The following is from the area form for Ashmont Hill, Boston Landmarks Commission
12 Alban Street is one ofthe important examples of the work of Edwin J. Lewis on Ashmont Hill. It stands with Lewis’ trademark massive gambrel facade facing the street. Covered with a skin of shingles, this house is as much a work of sculpture as it is architecture. It also speaks to the First Period New England architecture that was such an inspiration to architects designing in the Shingle Style. According to Tucci, “one of Lewis’ chief sources of inspiration for its plain and unadorned shingled gambrel profile and overall informality of plan and mass was the seventeenth -century Fairbanks House in Dedham.” This house undoubtedly reflects Lewis’ antiquarian interests as he was active in the Dorchester Historical Society during the late 19th century.
The following is from: Ashmont Hill Association House Tour Guide, Sunday, May 22, 1977
One of the houses in the neighborhood designed by Edwin J. Lewis, this Shingle Style home has an unusual gambrel roof and what seem to Lewis’s “trademarks”: heavy horizontal brackets under the eaves, tiny pointed “teeth” along the lower edge of the shinglework, and a strong horizontal porch.
Owners from atlases:
1889 12 Alban Street does not appear in the 1889 atlas
1894 12 Alban Street first appears in the 1894 atlas with owner Sarah E.W. Smith who also owns14 Alban and also 128 Ashmont, all on the same lot.
1898 same as 1894
1904 Sarah E.W. Smith Heirs own the property with all three buildings.
1910 same as 1904
1918 same as 1904
1933 same as 1904
Deed
August 21, 1883 from George D. Welles to Sarah E. W. Smith, wife of John G. R. Smith 1608.204 lots 192, 193, 194
parcel of land
Sept. 17, 1883 from Thomas L. Sprague to Sarah E. W. Smith 1610.465
Oct. 31, 1885 from George D. Welles 1699.239 Ashmont Streets pt lots 192, 193, 194
May 22, 1891 from Addington M. Bartlett to Sarah E. W. Smith 1997.142 pt lots 192, 193, 194 & 195
Dorchester Blue Books
1885 There are no street numbers, but John G.R. Smith and Charles G.B. Smith are listed as residents of Alban Street
1894 Residents of 12 [i.e. 14]Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. John G. R. Smith, Charles B. Smith, Mrs. Marie L. Seaver, Miss Bertha T. Seaver
1896 Residents of 12 [i.e. 14] Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. John G. R. Smith, Charles B. Smith, Mrs. Marie L. Seaver, Miss Bertha T. Seaver
1896 Residents of 12 [i.e. 14] Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. John G. R. Smith, Charles G. Smith, Miss Bertha F. Seaver
1900 Resident of 12 [i.e. 14] Alban Street was John G. R. Smith
1902 Resident of 12 [i.e. 14] Alban Street was John G. R. Smith
1904 no entry
1906 no entry
1908 Mr. & Mrs. Herbert N. Keene; Miss A. Florence Keene; Dr. & Mrs. Charles H. Keene, Office hours 2 to 3 and 7 to 8 p.m. Tel 567-2
1910 no entry
1913 Mr. & Mrs. F. S. Davis
1915 no entry