Chateau Fairmount

History / Lowell in stone

The Ames castle, Tewksbury (demolished)

A general’s fieldstone castle on a hill just outside Lowell, owned by the family that later owned Chateau Fairmount — and lost in 2012 because no lawful use for a house that size could be agreed.

In 1906 General Adelbert Ames — Union general, Reconstruction governor and senator of Mississippi, and son-in-law of Lowell’s General Benjamin Butler — built a seventeen-room house of fieldstone, with reinforced-concrete floors, on the crest of Prospect Hill in North Tewksbury, overlooking the farmland he had bought there. He spent his summers in it and his winters in Florida, at Ormond Beach, where John D. Rockefeller was his golfing companion; he died in 1933, the last surviving general of the Civil War. His son Butler Ames, the former congressman, lived in the house until his death in 1954. Tewksbury called it the Ames castle.

The family’s ties to 236 Fairmount Street are close. The general’s daughter Edith married Charles Brooks Stevens in Lowell in 1896, and from 1925 to 1944 the Stevenses — “of Tewksbury” in both deeds — owned Chateau Fairmount and let it as apartments. The first tenant the 1931 directory names in the divided house is Butler Ames.

How the castle was lost

By the late 1980s the house — nearly 12,800 square feet on about three acres, in a district zoned for single-family homes and farming — was being rented as apartments. A neighbor sued, and in January 1991 the Middlesex Superior Court ruled that the property could not lawfully house more than one family. A second judgment in 1999 gave the owner a year to comply; the apartments continued.

In 2010 the owner proposed to restore the castle as ten rental apartments under Chapter 40B, the state’s affordable-housing law, through a program that needs the town’s sponsorship. The town’s housing partnership supported the plan; the Board of Selectmen tabled it, saying the board would not partner with an owner in contempt of a court order, and the town went back to court. The 2011 settlement left three paths: a comprehensive permit for apartments, conversion to a single-family house, or demolition and subdivision. Neighbors, the Globe reported, were united against below-market housing on the site, though some wanted the building saved.

In March 2012 the Historic Commission voted the castle “preferably preserved,” calling it one of the most significant historic structures in the town, which delayed demolition by nine months while the town tried to negotiate a way to keep it. No agreement was reached. The property was sold to a developer in November 2012, the commission lifted the delay, and the castle was demolished on December 10, 2012, to make way for three single-family houses. “In the end,” the town’s community-development director said, “it just wasn’t financially practical to keep it as a single family home.” The developer said that historic elements were removed before the demolition.

Why it matters here

The Ames castle and 236 Fairmount Street faced the same question: what a very large house is for once no single family can keep it. Chateau Fairmount survived it by changing use — four apartments by 1927, a rest home from 1957 (approved on appeal), and a shared household today — each step needing a permit or the zoning board’s consent. The castle on Prospect Hill never secured a lawful shared use: the town would not sponsor apartments while court orders against the existing ones stood unmet, single-family use did not pay, and the building was lost. The Lowell Historic Board’s newsletter mourned it as “yet another historic structure” lost to “progress.” The lesson this page draws is that a large historic house survives when its owner and its town can agree on a lawful way for it to be lived in.

Still to check

  • The architect and builder (Tewksbury Historical Society; the 1906 building permit or local press).
  • A photograph that can be published: the castle before 2012 (Tewksbury Historical Society, Tewksbury Public Library, family papers at Smith College), or a labeled modern illustration made from reference photographs.
  • The acreage: “nearly 1,000 acres” (Town Crier, 2019) or “700 acres” (Tewksbury Historical Society, quoted by the Globe, 2012).
  • Whether the Stevenses’ Tewksbury home was on the Ames land.

Sources

The others