Dorchester Illustration no. 2390 Welles Mansion
Welles Mansion
The home of the Welles family was the original estate house for Ashmont Hill when the hill was all open land except for the house in the illustration. George Derby Welles, who lived in Paris, inherited the estate from his grandfather in 1870 and asked Edward Ingersoll Browne to have a sub-division plan drawn up for the sale of lots. The house was replaced by the Edward Pierce School in 1892, and the school was itself replaced by the Codman Square branch of the Boston Public Library in the last quarter of the 20th century. Illustration is from The Homes of Our Forefathers by Edwin Whitefield. (Boston, 1880).
The estate house must have been built in the 18th century due to its Georgian style. We know that General Henry Knox and his family lived there for a while just after the Revolutionary War in 1784. Daniel Webster lived there in 1822. Later in the 19th century the house fell from its high estate when ownership passed out of the Welles family. “For a period a lager-beer garden flourished on its grounds, an unsightly board fence concealing the former attractions of the property, and serving as a disagreeable eye-sore to the people. Fortunately, however a third turn of affairs brought the stated into better use; for the house was demolished, the fence torn down, and the splendid building erected which will go down history bearing the name of one of Dorchester’s most honored citizens,–the Henry L. Pierce School.” (from Good Old Dorchester by William Dana Orcutt). The author’s attitude toward demolishing the old to bring in the new is still with us today. Now the School, too, has disappeared into history. It was replaced by the current Codman Square branch of the Boston Public Library at the corner of Welles Avenue and Washington Street.
Ashmont Hill was developed into a railroad suburb in the late 19th century, now still exhibiting 40 acres of substantial, well-crafted, well-designed and well-preserved late-19th-century residences. George Derby Welles was born in Dorchester in 1843, and he outlived his siblings and his father, all dead by 1847. George Derby Welles inherited the land in Dorchester, including land west of Washington Street. By the time the land was offered for sale, George seems to have been living in Paris, where he died in 1923, although he had claimed Boston as his legal home. Subdivision plans published in 1871 indicated small lots, but apparently buyers in the 1870s and 1880s preferred to buy larger parcels by combining small lots into larger ones to build more substantial homes. Street after street in the Ashmont Hill residential quarter west of Peabody Square is bordered by wood frame, mostly single-family residences noteworthy for their originality and/or exuberance of design, quality craftsmanship, surviving stables on still-ample lots, etc. Exceptional examples of the Italianate / Mansard, Stick, Shingle, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles (as well as hybrids of these popular late-Victorian architectural modes) appear at every turn. (architectural comments from Neighborhood description of Ashmont Hill from the Boston Landmarks Commission).