Memorial Hall — the Pollard Memorial Library
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.
Beside City Hall, and built in the same years, Memorial Hall was Lowell’s monument to its Civil War dead and its public library in one. Its architect was a Lowell native, Frederick W. Stickney, who designed mansions and public buildings across New England and New York; this is reckoned his grandest. A fire in 1915 nearly destroyed it; it was restored that year with military murals by Paul Philippoteaux, restored again inside in 1980, and renamed for Samuel S. Pollard in 1981.
Still to check
- The quarry sources for the granite; Stickney’s other Belvidere houses.