The Faulkner house — “Faulkner’s Folly”
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. This entry rests on secondary accounts not yet checked against original records; see “Still to check”.
Four years after Atherton’s house went up on Fairmount Street, the woollen manufacturer Frederic Faulkner began a far larger one on the crest of the hill behind it, on the site of Captain Wyman’s unfinished observatory of the 1840s. Designed by the Boston architect W. Whitney Lewis — who had just finished a house nearby for Faulkner’s brother John — it was built entirely of pink North Conway granite, with a tower and observatory, at a cost said to exceed $125,000; the interior was never quite finished.
On 17 August 1896, with the family away, it burned; the walls fell and the interior was lost, and arson was rumoured but never proved. Faulkner, by then established in Connecticut, sold the ruins in 1901 to William T. White, who rebuilt a smaller house without the tower — the building that stands today, and by one account the last great Gilded Age house built in Lowell. A quarrel over the adjoining lots (“the siege of Quality Hill”, 1903–04) is a story of its own.
Still to check
- The street number of the surviving house; the Faulkner and White deeds; the 1896 fire reports in the Lowell Sun and Courier; whether Lewis’s drawings were published.