Lowell & Belvidere
Beyond the castle walls
Chateau Fairmount is one house among many on Belvidere Hill in Lowell. These pages look past its walls: at the families who lived around it, at the neighborhood filling in year by year, at the city’s other stone and towered buildings, and at the books and records the research is built on.
If you live on the hill and know something about your own house, or have an old photograph of the street, we would love to hear from you.
Read and explore
Lowell through time
Old photographs of Lowell, 1860s–1920s, by place: Belvidere and Fairmount Street, the mills and canals, Merrimack Street, churches and civic buildings, and carriages, streetcars, trains and the first cars.
Belvidere Hill: the neighbors, 1880–1925
The bankers, mill agents, lawyers and editors of Belvidere Hill — who lived in the houses around the castle, and how their lives crossed it.
Belvidere, year by year
Watch the neighborhood grow around the house: every building appears on the map in the year it was built.
Lowell in stone
The Faulkner house, City Hall, the State Armory, Memorial Hall, the old post office, the old county jail and the lost Ames castle: the castle among its towered, rock-faced contemporaries, and who designed them.
The Research Library
The printed books and city records behind the history of 236 Fairmount Street: Lowell histories, city directories 1832–1985, city documents, legislative manuals and biographical dictionaries, each linked to the Internet Archive.
Neighbors’ houses appear on these pages as buildings with their history; we do not name the people who live in them today.