Chateau Fairmount

History / People

John G. Wolcott

b. 1891 — Born 1891 (Library of Congress copyright catalog, “Wolcott, John Gilmore, 1891–”). Death not yet found.

Also recorded as: John Gilmore Wolcott; Fra Angelo Bomberto.

Schoolmaster, painter and writer who lived in one of the apartments at 236 Fairmount Street from at least 1931 into the late 1940s, and ran the Whistler House from there.

Documented profile. Built from records we have read: deeds, directories, newspapers, inscriptions. Each statement links to its source.

Life

John G. Wolcott was the most public of the tenants of the apartment years. He was master of the Greenhalge School on Ennell Street — the Lowell Sun reported his election in 1922 — and through the late 1920s and 1930s he wrote for the Journal of Education from there: profiles of educators, a piece on the teacher as “blackboard illustrator,” and in 1938 a regular column, “What’s Doing in Art?”

He was also a working painter. A Grumbacher advertisement in the Magazine of Art in October 1944 introduces him under his pen name, “Fra Angelo Bomberto,” as an “annotator of the art world, painter, and Director of the Whistler Museum; President of the Lowell Art Association (which owns Whistler’s Birthplace),” who had “painted many murals, foremost among them ‘Boston’ for the largest office building in New England,” and gives his address: “John G. Wolcott, 236 Fairmount St., Lowell, Mass.” For most of the 1940s the national art magazines’ exhibition listings told artists to write to him there about shows at the Whistler House; in 1948 they list a “Fra Angelo Bomberto Forum of Art” at Whistler’s Birthplace. In 1946 he showed with the Andover artists as state chairman of the American Artists Professional League, and in 1954 a painting of his, of Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Rice hunting with the Myopia hounds at Hamilton, was the cover of The Chronicle of the Horse. He registered a book, “Fra Angelo Bomberto in the underworld of art,” for copyright between 1946 and 1954.

In the 1940s, then, artists across the country who wanted to show at Whistler’s Birthplace wrote to the stone house.

Records and artifacts

On the timeline

The house is let as apartments

The 1931 city directory lists three households at 236 Fairmount Street — flat 1, Butler Ames, president of the Heinze Electric Company and almost certainly the owner’s brother-in-law; flat 2, Donald F. Cameron and John G. Wolcott, a grammar-school master; flat 3, William E. Sharpe jr., a purchasing agent — and later directories four to six, with a machinist’s family at the rear in 1936. The owner, Charles Brooks Stevens, lived in Tewksbury. The 1981 survey’s "mid-20th century" conversion was in fact complete by 1931.[C-021, C-017]

DocumentedCharles Brooks Stevens

What is uncertain: When the division began — under Stevens after 1925, or earlier — is not known.

What remains uncertain

  • When he moved in and when he left: the 1931 directory is the first record found and the 1948 art listings the last.
  • Whether the mural “Boston” survives, and which building it was painted for.
  • His death date.

Records consulted

Public tributes and family notices; see the text.

Help us get John right

This page is a working record, not a finished one. If you are a descendant, a collector, a local historian or an archivist and you hold anything connected to John G. Wolcott — a photograph, a letter, a diary, an object, a family story, a document we have misread — we would like to hear from you. We publish nothing without permission, credit every contribution, and correct the page when the evidence says we should.

We are especially looking for:

  • His paintings and murals.
  • Lowell Art Association records of the 1940s, when its correspondence went to 236 Fairmount Street.

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