The 2½-story Gothic Revival house that first stood at 64 Highland Street, situated across the street from the Highland Street Reservoir, was constructed in 1860 for owner Charles Coffin Little, co-founder of the publishing firm Little, Brown and Company.
The most romantic of the picturesque styles and the one that first attracted American architects and builders was the Gothic Revival. The style first appeared in the United States in churches and was not widely adopted for houses until well into the 19th century as prospective owners looked to a romanticized past for design inspiration.
While the Greek Revival style was much more popular due to American desires to separate from British-influenced types, a few commissions were inspired by British Gothic buildings. The Gothic Revival style in America was advanced by architects Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing, authors of influential house plan books, which promoted appropriate designs for rural settings. Houses in this style are often designed with complex and irregular shapes and forms fitting well into the natural landscape.
In 1863, Little sold the handsome house to Professor Charles Franklin Dunbar, a historian and the first Chair of Political Economy at Harvard. Dunbar was Dean of Harvard College from 1876 to 1882 and Dean of the reorganized Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1890 to 1895. Professor Dunbar died in his home on January 29, 1900. The house was then owned by his son William H. Dunbar, who died in the house in August 1935 at age 72.
64 Highland St was set to be sold the following spring. Newspaper clippings note a wide array of tenants at the property in the following decades until it was purchased by Alan and Claire Steinert in the early 1960s. Finding the house too large and outdated for their tastes, the couple demolished the building to make way for a new modern residence to be designed by architect F.F. Bruck.
Check out yesterday’s Modern Monday post to learn more about the house that replaced this Gothic Revival building and still stands on the lot today.
