Neighbors whose lives touched the house on the hill — through the banks Bonney ran, the companies he advised, the architects and the families that came after.
James C. Abbott
24 Fairmount Street (18 in the 1886 numbering), the James Abbott House of about 1868
Born at Andover, June 3, 1823; Phillips Academy, two years at Dartmouth, Harvard Law School; a Lowell lawyer for more than fifty years. Elected mayor as a Democrat in 1886 and re-elected for 1887. The directories give his office at 45, later 71, Central Street, and in 1894 the presidencies of the First National Bank and of the Lowell Mutual Fire Insurance Company. His widow Philena still lived in the house in 1916, with their son James M. Abbott, banker and broker.
The tie: Arthur Bonney had been president of the First National Bank from 1864 to 1880; Abbott was its president in Bonney’s last years on the hill. Both were Lowell lawyers of the same generation.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1886; Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1916; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 1.
Arthur G. Pollard
110 Mansur Street, the Arthur Pollard House of 1885
Dry-goods merchant, A. G. Pollard & Co., 144 Merrimack Street; in 1900 also “pres. Merchants National Bank.” By 1920 his firm, incorporated in 1907 as The A. G. Pollard Company, ran what Coburn called one of the largest department stores in Massachusetts, fronting on Merrimack, Palmer and Middle Streets. He was an incorporator of the Lowell Board of Trade in 1890, with his neighbors George A. Marden and Charles A. Stott.
The tie: Bonney was president of the Merchants’ National Bank from 1880 until his death in 1896. In January 1896 the stockholders re-elected Bonney president and Pollard vice president; by 1900 Pollard was president.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900; Lowell Sun, January 15, 1896 (bank elections); Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 2.
The Francis family
80 Mansur Street (the James Francis House, 1886) and 68 Mansur Street (the Sarah Francis House)
In 1894 “James, agent and engineer, Locks and Canals” at 80 Mansur. In 1900 “Sarah W. widow of James B.” at 68 Mansur and “Mary C. widow of James” at 80. James B. Francis (1815–1892), the hydraulic engineer of the Lowell canals and inventor of the Francis turbine, married Sarah W. Brownell in 1837; their son James, born 1840, was a Civil War officer and followed him at Locks and Canals.
The tie: Bonney was counsel to the Proprietors of Locks and Canals, the company the Francises ran. The company’s 1849 reservoir is on Fairmount Street, inside the district.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900; Wikipedia, “James B. Francis”.
George A. Marden
84 Fairmount Street (68 in the 1886 numbering)
Publisher of the Lowell Courier in 1886; president of the Lowell Courier Publishing Company in 1894; editor in chief of the Courier-Citizen in 1900, with his son Philip S. Marden, lawyer, living at home. Marden (1839–1906), a Dartmouth graduate, was Massachusetts Treasurer and from 1899 assistant treasurer of the United States at Boston. Coburn quotes his own account of how, reporting for the Boston Advertiser in 1867, he came to Lowell and bought the Courier with Edward T. Rowell; he was much sought as an after-dinner speaker. His son Philip became managing editor in 1902 and president of the Courier-Citizen Company after his father’s death. His widow Mary Porter Marden was still at 84 Fairmount in 1916.
The tie: The newspaper editor on the street: the Lowell Daily Courier, which reported Emma Bonney’s death in September 1892, was edited by a man who lived a few hundred yards down the hill.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1886; Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900; Lowell city directory, 1916; Wikipedia, “George A. Marden”; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 2.
The Faulkners
32 Belmont Avenue (John A. Faulkner, 1887) and 86 Belmont Avenue (Frederic Faulkner, 1889–90)
Both of Luther W. Faulkner & Sons, woolen manufacturers, foot of Faulkner Street, in 1894. The partnership was incorporated as the Faulkner Mills in 1897 and passed to the American Woolen Company in April 1899, with John A. Faulkner as agent (Coburn); by 1900 the directory has him as agent of the Bay State mills and president of the Lowell Five Cent Savings Bank. Frederic’s stone house burned in August 1896 and was rebuilt in the early 1900s by a later owner.
The tie: The other stone castle on the hill — see Lowell in Stone. The Faulkners were building on Belmont Avenue in the very years the Bonneys moved into the Atherton house.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900.
Artemas S. Tyler
57 Fairmount Street, the Artemas S. Tyler House of 1890–91
Treasurer of the Lowell Five Cent Savings Bank, Merrimack Street at John, in 1894. By 1906 his widow Ethalinda lived on the street.
The tie: Banker to the neighborhood: the Five Cent Savings Bank’s treasurer lived on Fairmount Street and its president, John A. Faulkner, on Belmont Avenue.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1906.
Frank J. Ladd and Major Jonathan Ladd
109 Fairmount Street, the Frank J. Ladd House of 1890–91
Frank J. Ladd (1849–1915), born in Lowell, worked for a Boston oil company and then ran his own oil business in Boston (the 1886 directory has him at 2 Nesmith Street, “oils (Boston)”). In 1890 he sold out and became, in Coburn’s words, “the accredited representative of large business interests in legislative matters,” an expert on tariffs and taxes. He bred and trained horses on his farm on the Butman Road. His father, Major Jonathan Ladd (1820–1889), came to Lowell from New Hampshire in 1834, worked in the Lowell Machine Shop and practiced law at the Middlesex bar from 1844 to 1889. In April 1861, as master of transportation, he went with the Sixth Massachusetts on its march through Baltimore, and he served as an army paymaster, with the rank of major, until 1865.
The tie: The Ladds’ house went up in 1890–91, while the Bonneys lived at the top of the street. Major Ladd and Arthur Bonney practiced at the same Middlesex bar in the same decades.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1886; Lowell city directory, 1906; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 3, pp. 341–345.
Albion C. Taylor and Moses Little
166 Fairmount Street (the Albion C. Taylor House, about 1876) and 77 Mansur Street (the Moses Little House, 1881)
Partners in Cook, Taylor & Co., 98 Merrimack and 231–233 Central Street, in 1894 and 1900. Albion C. Taylor, born at Waterbury, Maine, in 1834, founded the business in 1854 to buy and ship fruit; with Gilmore G. Cook as partner it became a dry-goods and ladies’ ready-to-wear house, “Old and Reliable.” Taylor’s widow Susan was at 166 Fairmount in 1906 and 1916.
The tie: Their firm’s building at 231 Central Street (1884) was designed by Frederick W. Stickney, the architect of Memorial Hall — see Lowell in Stone.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900; Lowell city directory, 1906; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 3; City of Lowell Historic Board, “Frederick Stickney”.
Franklin Nourse
53 Mansur Street, the Lawrence Manufacturing Company Agent’s House (about 1899)
“Agent Lawrence Mfg. Co.” in 1900, living in the house the company provided for its agent.
The tie: By 1931 the president of the Lawrence Manufacturing Company was Charles Brooks Stevens — who owned 236 Fairmount Street from 1925 to 1944.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1900; Lowell city directory, 1931.
Charles H. Stowell
99 Fairmount Street
A physician at 176 Middle Street in 1900; by 1906 and still in 1916, “treas. and general manager, J. C. Ayer Co.” — the makers of Ayer’s Sarsaparilla and Lowell’s best-known patent medicines.
The tie: Abel Atherton, who built the castle, had started out selling a patent medicine of his own: Dr. Atherton’s Dew Drop Bitters.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1900; Lowell city directory, 1906; Lowell city directory, 1916.
Dr. Herbert P. Jefferson
7 Fairmount Street, the Herbert Jefferson House of about 1888
Physician, 49 Kirk Street, in 1894; in 1900 with an office at 212 Merrimack Street and a house at Millis, while Mrs. Marietta R. Jefferson kept the Fairmount Street house.
The tie: His house, near the start of the street, was designed by Frederick W. Stickney.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900; City of Lowell Historic Board, “Frederick Stickney”.
Across the street, 239 Fairmount
239 Fairmount Street, the Chase/Pindar House of about 1857, opposite the castle
In 1894 Alfred Clarke, general manager of the Eastern Electric Light and Storage Battery Company; in 1900 George W. Raynes, watchmaker, and Harry C. Raynes, architect (Davis & Raynes, Hildreth Building); by 1906 James J. Kerwin, lawyer, 20 Hildreth Building, and his wife Irene P. Kerwin, who were still there in 1917.
The tie: The nearest neighbors the Bonneys and Lilleys had: an electric-light man in the year Clara Lilley died, an architect when the judge moved in, and then the Kerwins. In 1917 gas leaking from a broken service pipe in Fairmount Street — broken, the company argued, by a city steam roller — damaged the shade trees on both properties, and in May 1920 Judge Lilley, his daughter Bonney L. Dunbar and Irene Kerwin won damages from the Lowell Gas Light Company — $1,250 for the Lilley estate, $400 for Mrs. Kerwin.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900; Lowell city directory, 1906; Lowell Sun, May 19–21, 1920 (the gas case).
Alexander G. Cumnock
52 Belmont Avenue, the Alexander G. Cumnock House (about 1882)
Born in Glasgow, September 28, 1834; came to Lowell as a boy, went to the Edson Grammar School and into the Hamilton mills; agent of the Boott Cotton Mills from 1868 and, by 1900, treasurer of the Appleton Company. Coburn calls him “the dean of the cotton manufacturing industry in New England,” a leader in American textile education.
The tie: One of the mill agents of the hill. In 1894 he signed, with Faulkner, Marble, Francis and Stott, the citizens’ petition against moving the Victory statue from Monument Square.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1900; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 1; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 3.
Levi Sprague
52 Mansur Street, the Levi Sprague House (1867)
Born on the family farm in Billerica, September 16, 1810, the youngest son of a farmer; walked to Arlington at seventeen “carrying a capital of a lone dime”; died in Lowell, August 28, 1902, aged ninety-one, leaving a written account of his life. In 1894 president of the Erie Telegraph and Telephone Company; in 1900 president of the Traders’ and Mechanics’ Insurance Company.
The tie: The oldest of the neighbors: born before Lowell existed, he lived on Mansur Street through the whole of the Atherton and Bonney years.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1894; Lowell city directory, 1900; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 3.
Charles A. Stott
173 Nesmith Street, the Charles A. Stott House of 1875–76
Born in 1835 in the part of Dracut that became Lowell; died in Lowell in 1912. His father, Charles Stott, was agent and treasurer of the Belvidere Woolen Mills and built woolen mills of his own on the Concord River; after the father’s death in 1881 the son sold them to the new Stirling Mills. Charles A. Stott served as a major of Massachusetts volunteers in 1861–62, sat in the legislature in 1866, was mayor of Lowell in 1876 — the year his house was finished — chaired the Massachusetts Republican Party from 1881 to 1883 and was a presidential elector in 1884. In 1900 his son Charles W., “at Belvidere Woolen Co.,” boarded at 173 Nesmith.
The tie: A former mayor two streets away. He was an incorporator of the Board of Trade in 1890, with Pollard and Marden, and signed the 1894 Victory statue petition.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1900; National Register nomination, Belvidere Hill Historic District (1995), section 8; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 3; Wikipedia, “Charles A. Stott”.
The Butlers and the Ameses
General Benjamin F. Butler’s house in Lowell; after his death in 1893, the home of his daughter Blanche and her husband, General Adelbert Ames
Butler (1818–1893), Lowell’s most famous lawyer and politician, governor of Massachusetts in 1883. His daughter Blanche married Adelbert Ames at St. Anne’s, Lowell, in 1870; the Ameses lived in the Butler house after 1893 and built their stone “castle” on Prospect Hill in Tewksbury in 1906.
The tie: Butler is named among the leaders of the Middlesex bar in the 1896 memorial for Bonney. Ames’s daughter Edith married Charles Brooks Stevens in Lowell in 1896, and the Stevenses owned 236 Fairmount Street from 1925 to 1944; the first tenant named in the divided house, in 1931, was her brother Butler Ames. See the Ames castle in Lowell in Stone.
Sources: Lowell Sun, April 22, 1896 (the bar memorial); Army and Navy Journal, June 20, 1896 (the Ames–Stevens wedding); Larz F. Neilson, “History: Gen. Adelbert Ames, the man who built ‘The Castle’,” Wilmington Town Crier, March 9, 2019.
Larkin T. Trull
56 Fairmount Street, the Larkin T. Trull House of 1902
Harvard, class of 1879; read law in the office of D. S. and G. F. Richardson and was admitted to the Middlesex bar in 1882. From 1888 he practiced with Frederick N. Wier at 103 Central Street for twenty-nine years (Richardsons, Trull & Wier in 1906; Trull & Wier in 1916). He was city solicitor for two years, chairman of the Republican City Committee in 1886–87, an original trustee of Lowell General Hospital and vice president of the Middlesex Trust Company. He married Hannah J. Bailey in 1884 and kept a farm at his boyhood home in Tewksbury.
The tie: A younger lawyer of the Lilley years; his partners the Richardsons, George F. and Daniel M., lived on Nesmith Street, in the Stephen Mansur House and at 150 Nesmith.
Sources: Lowell city directory, 1900; Lowell city directory, 1906; Lowell city directory, 1916; Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), vol. 3.
