In 1849, Daniel Treadwell purchased from Harvard College a section of land from what was then known as the summerhouse lots. Treadwell married Adeline Lincoln of Hingham in 1831 and in 1834 was appointed Rumford Professor and Lecturer on the Application of Science to the Useful Arts at Harvard.
Three years later, Professor Treadwell supervised the construction of Gore Hall (now demolished) to house the Harvard Library and devised a method of heating that building.
Treadwell was best known as an inventor, first manufacturing wooden screws. He later devised improvements to the printing press and was the first in the United States to produce the a sheet of paper printed by machine rather than by hand.
Treadwell’s travels to England in 1835 may have influenced his choice of the Regency style for his first home, built by William Saunders in 1838. This building still stands, though it was moved from 48 Quincy Street to 21 Kirkland Street, and is now the Harvard Sparks house.
Treadwell sold this house in 1847, and in 1849 hired Saunders again to build the house at 29 Concord Avenue. Treadwell had purchased The following is a selection taken from Susan Maycock and Charles Sullivan’s Building Old Cambridge (2016)
A few houses built in Old Cambridge during the 1830s and ’40s followed a form of the Classical Revival style that was related to the English Regency period of the early 1800s. These flush-boarded houses had cube-like massing, low hip roofs, and broad pilasters without capitals repeated across the facade. The conservative, academic style was found primarily in the Boston area but also occasionally along the Maine coast…The earliest Cambridge example is the house that William Saunders built for Daniel Treadwell in 1838.
Treadwell lived in the house until his death in 1872, and it was then occupied by Judge Horatio G. Parker and later owned by George H. Abbott, who made significant renovations to the property, including a pitch roof, addition of a billiard parlor on the east side and new interior finishes. Various other occupants lived in the house until it was demolished in 1959 to make way for the Continental Terrace apartments. For more information on this new building, check out our Modern Monday post from January 27th!
Sources
Susan E. Maycock and Charles M. Sullivan, Building Old Cambridge: Architecture and
Development (MIT Press, 2016)
CHC biographical files
CHC survey files
Wyman, Morrill. “Memoirs of Daniel Treadwell.” In Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, XI:334–35. Cambridge, Mass: John Wilson and Son, 1888.
