No. 9022 3 Beaumont Street, photograph January 12, 2007
Date of construction: probably 1876 since Boston Directory shows Samuel H. L. Pierce on Beaumont Street for the first time. His wife purchased the property in 1889 from Frederick L. Pierce, Samuel’s brother.
Architect: not known, attributed to Luther Briggs, Jr., but Samuel H. L. Pierce was a builder, so he may have been the architect/builder.
The City of Boston assessor has this property as 51-53 Beaumont Street
Source: Ashmont: An Historical Guide to Peabody Square, Carruth’s Hill, and Ashmont Hill and the architecture of Edwin J. Lewis, Jr. and John A. Fox by Paul Doughlas Shand-Tucci. Dorchester: Dorchester Historical Society, 1991.
p. 45
… 53 Beaumont, the Samuel H. L. Pierce House, [is] a gorgeous Italianate mansion …
The Pierce House in a sense was even more important than Herbert Carruth’s, for the Pierces had been prominent in Dorchester since the 1660s, when their first house (today the property of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) was erected just on the other side of Adams Street. By the late nineteenth century this branch of the Pierces had become one of Boston’s leading families; it included S. S. Pierce, the famous Boston grocer, who continued to summer in Dorchester until his death in 1880; and Henry L. Pierce, the owner of Baker’s Chocolate, the leading nineteenth-century benefactor of the Museum of Fine Arts and Boston’s mayor after Dorchester’s annexation. The fact that Samuel Pierce, himself a leading Boston builder, chose to use a portion of the hill pasture he had inherited for a new garden-suburb-type house (a house, observed the Dorchester Beacon, “he himself built on land inherited from his father [on] one of the most beautiful spots in Dorchester, at the very crest of Ashmont hill … command[ing] a magnificent view of land and sea”) must have greatly encouraged all those interested in the area’s future.
[Note- it has since been determined that the early Pierce house on the other side of Adams Street was actually built in the early 1680s. The Society is now re-named Historic New England]
The following is from the inventory form for Carruth Street – Peabody Square, Boston Landmarks Commission
Beaumont Street has its share of upscale, well-rendered homes with 53 Beaumont Street representing the easternmost house on this street included in the Carruth Street/Peabody Square area. Built in 1877, this cupola-topped house is one of the oldest house in this area. This Italianate/Stick style house has been attributed to Dorchester architect and surveyor, Luther Briggs, Jr. Composed of a two- story main block and west ell, this clapboard-sheathed house exhibits a wide band of closely spaced vertical wooden elements. Its edges are accented by narrow corner boards. Still intact are original multi-panel double doors which open onto a porch with paired and chamfered posts. Its windows are ornately enframed and it is enclosed by a slate covered hip roof. Its main facade’s center dormer exhibits Gothic Revival pointed arch windows. It is topped by a square cupola.
owners from atlases
1874 no house, owner of land was Thomas Pierce
1884 Frederick L. Pierce
1889 Nancy Pierce
1894 Nancy Pierce
1898 Nancy Pierce
1904 Alice J. Pierce
1910 Alice J. Pierce
1918 Francis I. Welch
1933 Frederick B. Early
deed
April 23, 1889 from Frederick L. Pierce to Nancy Pierce, wife of Samuel H. L. Pierce, Suffolk Registry 1872.458 lots C & E pl. d. Apr 17, 1876
land with the buildings thereon
Boston Directory
1876 Samuel H. L. Pierce, planing and moulding mill, 415 Dorchester avenue, house 74 F
1877, 1878, 1879, 1880,1881, 1882, 1883, 1884 Samuel H. L. Pierce, carpenter and stairbuilder,415 Dorchester av. h. Beaumont, Dor.
advertisement for his business on p. 1582 of the 1884 directory also in other years
Death record on ancestry
Samuel H. L. Pierce, b. about 1826, d. Dec. 28, 1909
1865 Massachusetts census
Boston location (Dorchester was not part of Boston until 1870)
Samuel H. L. Pierce, 39, builder
Nancy Pierce, 39
Florence A. Pierce, 11
Alice J. Pierce, 6
1880 census
Samuel H. L. Pierce, 54, carpenter and builder
Nancy Pierce, 54
Florence A. Pierce, 26
Alice J. Pierce, 21
The following is from the entry for Henry Leeds Pierce in American Series of Popular Biographies. Massachusetts Edition. This Volume Contains Biographical Sketches of Representative Citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Boston: Graves & Steinbarger, 1891.
Captain Thomas Pierce and his wife Martha Leeds Pierce had five children, as follows: Martha; Robert, who died in 1894, at the age of about seventy years, and who in early life was a seafaring man; Samuel H.L., now a resident of Dorchester; George, who died in 1896; Frederick Leeds.