Dorchester Illustration no. 2475 Walter Baker Old Stone Mill
The stone building at the left of the photo was known as the Old Stone Mill on the west side of Adams Street next to the Neponset River. Built in 1849, it replaced an earlier stone mill building on the same site. The top of Walter Baker’s Pierce Mill building appears in the distance on the east side of Adams Street. The Pierce Mill was constructed in 1872, so the photographs is no earlier than that year.
The early wooden mill building on this site was replaced in 1813 by Edmund Baker with a building constructed of granite blocks. The building was used for the manufacture of woolen cloth and satinette, a cotton product with a satin-like finish, as well as for the manufacture of chocolate. The building was destroyed by fire in 1848, and Walter Baker built a new stone building (the one in the photograph), to be used as a cacao roasting mill. In 1891 the building was replaced by the Baker Mill building, a brick building designed by Winslow and Wetherell in the Romanesque Revival style.
The Baker Mill building, built in 1891, now houses residential condominiums, where an individual unit may sell for many times the cost of construction of the whole six-story building: $135,000.