No. 12125 34 Alban Street soon after it was built in the 1880s
Date of construction: probably 1878
The Boston Directory for 1879 is the first to show Wood on Alban Street.
The following is from Ashmont by Douglass Shand-Tucci, p. 99-100.
… the next house on the right, the Frank Wood House, 35 [i.e., 34] Alban, while built on the largest lot of all (30,000 square feet, with the stable, now a residence, on Ocean Street) and itself perhaps the grandest of all these houses, is if anything probably closer to the sidewalk than any of the last eight.
Wood, a Boston printer as well known as Churchill, was born in Ireland of English and Scottish descent in 1842. He was brought to Boston at the age of four and educated in the public schools. He entered the printer’s trade as an apprentice at eleven and worked his way up thereafter to become foreman and then the founder of his own firm. Eventually he became a millionaire. Married twice, first to Annie Smith in 1870 and second, near the end of his life, to Dr. Lillian B. Neale, Wood had no children and thus was able to cast much bread upon Boston’s waters. Above all, in 1880 he established in honor of his first wife one of the very first substantial scholarships at Wellesley College, the founders of which, Mr. and Mr. Henry Fowle Durant, were close friends of the Woods and may well have known of the links between Wellesley and Welles Hill. Active in many causes, Wood was intensely religious, twice serving as president of the Boston Congregational Club and as a trustee of Northfield Seminary. Much interested as well in art, he was a member of the Boston Art Club and a trustee of the New England Conservatory of Music. Most unusual, he was also active in the Boston Indian Citizenship Association and appears to have been as ardently interest in Indian affairs as in women’s education. He died in 1914. He is, however, probably best known today as the founding benefactor of the Frank Wood Convalescent Home, one of the most outstanding institutions of its kind in Boston.
Wood’s Alban Street home was very much a showplace. In Men of Progress … Leaders in Business and Professional Life in … Massachusetts, the compilers wrote in 1896 that Mr. Wood resides in the Dorchester District [where] he possesses a fine library and a choice collection of paintings and rate engravings.” A towered Italianate house by Luther Briggs, Jr., I believe, Wood’s house is still a very dramatic piece of architecture, although stripped of much of its detail today, and together with its small gazebo, or summer house, set off to the side of the curving drive, it works with the deep setbacks of 35 and 25 Alban across the street, so that at this point Alban Street (by whose design, if anyone’s, I do not know) seems to open out into the kind of pastoral, romantic Victorian landscape of curving drives and shading trees, ample porches and Tuscan towers that was a persistent visual ideal of the last century. (Many trees need pruning badly, and in summer the landscape overwhelms the architecture. Frank Wood’s splendid tower, for example, is totally hidden. But in early spring and in the autumn this high ground on Alban Street is on even the cloudiest day very lovely.)
The following is from: Ashmont Hill Association House Tour Guide, Sunday, May 22, 1977
Dating from between 1874 and 1884, this magnificent house has lost its porches and has only the brackets at its roofline as a remnant of its original exterior detail. Note the gazebo in the side yard.
Owners from atlases:
1884 Frank Wood – his lot goes through to Ocean Street where he owns a carriage house that became 25 Ocean Street on the 1933 atlas.
1889 Frank Wood
1894 Frank Wood
1898 Frank Wood
1904 Frank Wood
1910 Frank Wood
1918 Frank Wood Hrs
1933 Lillian M. Ryder
Deed
June 8, 1875 from George Derby Welles to Frank Wood 1273.207 lots 197 & 198 & pt 199
Parcel of land
Boston Directory
1875, 1876, 1877, 1878 Frank Wood, steam printer, 352 Wash. h. Torrey
1879 Frank Wood, steam printer, 352 Wash. h. Alban, Dorch
Dorchester Blue Books
1885 There are no street numbers, but Frank Wood is listed as a resident of Alban Street.
1894 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood, At home Thursdays.
1896 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood At home Thursdays.
1900 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood
1902 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood
1904 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood
1906 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood
1908 Resident of 34 Alban Street was Mr. Frank Wood
1910 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood
1913 Residents of 34 Alban Street were Mr. & Mrs. Frank Wood
1915 Resident of 34 Alban Street was Mrs. Frank Wood
Death record
Frank Wood, b. 1842, died March 27, 1914
Census 1880
Frank Wood, 39, printer
Annie M. wood, 41
Adelaide Bullock, 17, servant
Mary Jordan, 23, servant
Census 1900
Frank Wood, 58, b. May 1842 in Ireland, printer
Annie N. Wood, 61
Harriet Smith, 82, mother-in-law
Fanny Smith, 34, boarder, dressmaker
Elsie Peters, 20, servant
Annie Alexander, 48, cook
James A. McPhearson, 38, coachman
The widow of Frank Wood’s grand-nephew was cleaning out her Milton house and decided that the photos she had of 34 Alban Street and neighborhood would be lost if she did not donate them to the Dorchester Historical Society. So the Society is the very grateful recipient. Frank Wood was the first owner of the house at 34 Alban. I am told he was quite wealthy and that the family was a little disappointed that he left his money to found The Frank Wood Home. I am told there is a plaque in his memory at the VA Hospital for his donations.
Dining room and parlor of 34 Alban Street, 1880s, photo no. 12126
This photo is of the rooms across the hall from the rooms we saw a couple of days ago. Notice the ornate furniture, framed pictures (including one on an easel), gas lamp fixture, and the draperies between the front room and the library.
Left-hand parlor looking toward dining room, photo no. 12132
Notice the number of framed pictures, the tufted upholstery, the tea service in the china cabinet, the gas lamps.
Readers’ comments about the statue
I’m pretty sure the statue in the doorway is a copy of Mercury by Giambologna (Jean Boulogne) of 1564-80, now in the Bargello in Florence. He made four different versions of the figure & countless reproductions in various sizes were made over the years (you can buy one now from the shop of the Metropolitan Museum in New York). Such a sculpture in an upper middle-class Victorian home would have signaled familiarity with European high culture and a cosmopolitan outlook. Judy Neiswander
David Mooney and Anthony Sammarco identified the statue as a running Mercury, apparently a popular figure. David also mentioned the pump organ that can be seen inside the doorway on the left.
34 Alban Street carriage house, photo no. 12131
This photo is from a series of 1880s photographs of 34 Alban Street. It one shows the view from the carriage house back toward the main house. The back end of the property was split off, and the carriage house became a 2-family house in 1921 numbered 25 Ocean Street. Is that corn growing in the yard?
Carriage house, photo no. 12130
Reader’s Comment
As someone who went “back to the Earth” in the 1970’s to a former dairy farm in Norwood, I definitely think that is corn. Since its height is more than “knee-high by the Fourth of July,” I reckon the picture was taken in mid- to late August. Assuming that time frame, do you suppose the shutters are closed against the hot summer sun, or perhaps in preparation for a hurricane? Given the dependence on almanacs as opposed to NOAA, I vote for the former. I remember a summertime visit to the Salem Towne House at Old Sturbridge Village, and seeing the shutters closed to keep out the sun, but with the slats opened somewhat to allow for breezes, and cheesecloth draped to discourage insects. Maybe these slats are fixed. Interesting to note that by the 1970’s the hybrid corn we grew in Norwood for human consumption had many fewer leaves than these (maybe silage?) stalks sport. That big black dog looks to be under the influence of Sirius, and I hope the wielder of the wheelbarrow is going away from the building, and not backing toward the open side of the bulkhead.
Regarding the second keyboard, I have sent the interior picture to my oldest brother, asking for his opinion regarding ID. He started piano lessons when Lower Mills had mills, worked his way through divinity school playing church organs, and hosted a series of small wheezers in his various parsonages, not to mention the one in our dining room at 18 River Street. We can probably trust his word on the subject.
Regards, Douglas R. Wynne
View of Ashmont Hill from top of 34 Alban Street, photo 12124
The photo was taken from the top of 34 Alban Street looking toward Codman Square. The house in the center of the picture is 67-69 Ocean Street, a double (attached single-family houses) mansard. The house to the left of that is 70 Roslin Street and farther to the left you can catch a glimpse of the Welles House that was located at the corner of Washington Street and Welles, where the Codman Square branch library is located today. On the right in the distance, Second Church shows up faintly, and closer in we can see Welles Avenue with mansard-roofed houses. There are three on the north side of the street and one larger house on the south side – this was later the Fitzgerald house where Rose Kennedy grew up.
The photo was taken after Frank Wood, the first owner of 34 Alban Street moved in. The house at 34 Alban does not appear on the 1882 map but does on the 1884 map. So the date of the photo could not be earlier than 1883. The house at 60 Ocean Street is not in the photo, but it appears in the 1889 map, so the photo cannot be as late as that.