Owners’ names fill the deeds; the directories also name the people who kept the house running. They appear only as a line or two in a printed list — an occupation, “at 236 Fairmount,” “boards do.” — and almost nothing else about them is known yet. This page gathers every one found so far, so that each can be followed.
The longest-serving was the nurse, Mrs. Louisa M. Best, listed in the house in 1900 and still there in 1916: the years in which Clara Bonney Lilley, whose mother died three months after her birth, grew from a small child into a college student. The coachman John J. McGowan drove the judge for at least sixteen years and saw the household through the change from horses to the motor car: “coachman” in 1900 and 1906, “chauffeur” by 1916.
Year by year, as printed
1886 (house numbered 170): Abel T. Atherton and Charles T. Atherton are joined at the address by “Stearing Hiram, carpenter, house 170 Fairmount” — a carpenter heading a household in the three-year-old house. He was very probably Hiram Spearing, the name misprinted: Abel Atherton had married Spearing’s daughter Georgiana at her father’s house in December 1884 (Lowell Daily Courier, December 23, 1884). If so, the bride’s father had moved into the castle with the couple.
May 1886: no coachman is listed in the directory, but there was one. The Courier’s account of a runaway on Fairmount Street, when Mrs. Atherton jumped from her husband’s carriage, says that “the driver stuck to the carriage.”
1894: “Tansey, Owen, coachman at 236 Fairmount, boards do.” — the coachman lived in, in Arthur Bonney’s last years.
1900: in Judge Lilley’s household, “Best, Louisa M. Mrs. nurse at 236 Fairmount”; “McGowan, John J. coachman, 236 Fairmount, house do.”; “McGowan, Mary, widow, boards 236 Fairmount”; and “Safvenbom Amelia, housekeeper at 236 Fairmount.”
1906: “McGowan John J coachman 236 Fairmount h do” and “Reilly Kora J domestic at 236 Fairmount.”
1916: “Best Louisa M Mrs nurse 236 Fairmount”; “McGowan John J chauffeur 236 Fairmount h do”; “O’Keefe Mary cook 236 Fairmount.”
1926, after the sale to the Stevenses: the only entry at the address is “McGowan Helena C teacher Riverside school res r 236 Fairmount” — a McGowan living at the rear, in the stable quarters. Whether she was John and Mary McGowan’s family is not established.
1931: with the house divided into apartments, the street directory still lists “r McGowan John J” — a John J. McGowan living at the rear of 236, thirty-one years after the judge’s coachman of that name first appears; that it is the same man is likely but not yet proven.
