Chateau Fairmount

History / Lowell in stone

Lowell in stone

The castle was not alone. In the ten years after 1883 Lowell built, in rock-faced stone with towers and round arches, a second hill-top castle, a City Hall, a Memorial Hall and much else. This page sets 236 Fairmount Street among its contemporaries, and names the architects where the record does.

The common language is the one Henry Hobson Richardson taught American architects in the 1870s and 80s: heavy walls of granite left rough as it came from the quarry, deep round-arched openings, steep roofs and a tower to mark the building on the skyline. The castle’s own dress is French rather than Romanesque — the 1981 survey calls it Chateauesque, after the châteaux of the Loire — but the stone, the tower and the decade are the same.[sources]

The castle’s round tower and chimneys against a blue sky
236 Fairmount Street, 1883: the earliest of Lowell’s major late-nineteenth-century stone mansions, according to the state survey.

The buildings

The Faulkner house — “Faulkner’s Folly”

Where
Belmont Avenue, Belvidere (the former Wyman’s Folly site)
Built
1887–88; burned 17 August 1896; rebuilt smaller, without its tower, from 1901
Architect
W. Whitney Lewis, Boston
Stone
Pink North Conway granite

The same hill, the same decade, the same instinct: a stone house that looks like a castle, with a tower, built by a manufacturer. Faulkner’s was bigger and did not survive; ours did.

attributed — to be checked

Lowell City Hall

Where
375 Merrimack Street
Built
1890–93 (design competition 1889)
Architect
Merrill & Cutler, Lowell (Otis Merrill and Arthur Cutler)
Stone
Rock-faced granite, with a tall clock tower

The same architects as the castle’s stable, the same rock-faced granite and the same love of a tower — a decade on and at civic scale.

Memorial Hall — the Pollard Memorial Library

Where
401 Merrimack Street
Built
Cornerstone 11 October 1890; dedicated 3 June 1892
Architect
Frederick W. Stickney, Lowell
Stone
Granite

A second Romanesque granite building of 1890–93 on Monument Square — proof that in the decade after the castle, rough stone and round arches were how Lowell chose to look permanent.

The Middlesex County Courthouse

Where
360 Gorham Street (South Common)
Built
1850; moved back on its lot and enlarged along Gorham Street, 1895–98
Architect
Ammi B. Young (1850); the 1890s addition’s architect to be confirmed
Stone
Brick (original), with an octagonal clock tower crowned by the scales of justice

Not stone, but the tower on the skyline belongs to the same family of civic landmarks — and it is the castle’s courthouse: Charles S. Lilley presided here.

The thread

Three names recur. Merrill & Cutler of Central Street drew the castle’s stable in 1883 and City Hall ten years later. Frederick W. Stickney, a Lowell man, drew Memorial Hall next door in the same years. W. Whitney Lewis of Boston drew the Faulkner houses on the hill above. Who drew the castle itself is the one thing none of the records says — which is why the question sits at the top of our research list.

Photographs of the public buildings will be added as they are taken from the street; none is reproduced from third parties here.