A tree grows in Brookline: a memoir of Longwood and Cottage Farmin the mid-nineteenth century

摘要

In 1850, Amos A. Lawrence (1814-1886) built a house at 135 Ivy Street in Brookline, Massachusetts. This impressive, three-story pudding stone Victorian Cottage was built for the Lawrences by the renowned architect, George Minot Dexter. On ninety acresof land purchased from David Sears, Amos Lawrence and his brother Abbott developed their private suburban estates surrounded by groves of trees, large gardens and park-like grounds. But the Lawrence family was not the first to come to Brookline. In fact, the credit for developing Longwood/Cottage Farm into the pleasant neighborhood that we still recognize today belongs to David Sears (1787—1871). In 1820-21, David Sears bought up two hundred acres — virtually the whole of Judge Samuel Sewell's farm — and divided the land into parcels destined to be occupied by himself or his friends and family. But gardens and grounds are ephemeral and fragile by nature and, hence, the nineteenth-century garden planted by Sarah Appleton Lawrence is no more and theremains of the estates created by the Sears and the Lawrences can only be known to us now from fragments of evidence from contemporaneous diaries, memoirs, correspondence, and photos. Unlike the resources that underpin Sam Bass Warner's Streetcar Suburbsor Henry Binford's Tlie First Suburbs, many documents about these nineteenth-century private estates are still in private archives and unavailable for historical research.