Anthony Mitchell Sammarco - Somerville

Winter Hill, seen from Central and Hudson Streets, was dotted with small farms and the well-tended orchard of the Dickerman family, as seen in this photograph from 1872. Just one year after Somerville was incorporated as a city, the area of Highland Avenue had become of tremendous value and was shortly to be subdivided for residential development. Winter Hill, which was at the junction of Broadway (often referred to as the Road to Winter Hill, the Road to Newtowne [Cambridge], and Milk Row) and Medford Street, would see large mansions built that enjoyed superb views of Boston, just a couple of miles away.

The Old Powder House was built on Quarry Hill, overlooking Two Penny Brook, in 1704 by Jean Mallet, a shipwright and later a miller. Built of locally quarried stone with walls that were two feet thick, it was a gristmill that ground corn into meal. In 1747, the mill was sold for 250 to the province of Massachusetts for a gun powder magazine.

In the late nineteenth century, Nathan Tufts children presented the powder house and the surrounding farm and orchard to the city of Somerville for a park. The Old Powder House was restored and a park was laid out by City Engineer Horace Eaton and landscaped, being renamed Nathan Tufts Park, and Powder House Terrace was laid out at the same time. A woman sits on a park bench near the old mill turned powder house in 1910.

The Oliver Tufts House was built in 1714 on Sycamore Street and was used as the headquarters of General Charles Lee, who commanded the left wing of General George Washingtons army. At the turn of the century, this was the headquarters of the Somerville Historical Society, which was founded in 1897.

The Stearns House was a mid-eighteenth-century house that was built on Broadway between Austin and Union Streets. Located at the foot of Ploughed Hill (later Mount Benedict), it was a typical farmhouse beyond The Neck on the Winter Hill Road.

The Hall House was built about 1800 on Elm Street (now College Avenue) and was known as the Swain Strawberry Farm Mansion. The farm was known for its delicious strawberries, which were cultivated on the estate and sold not just locally, but in Quincy Market in Boston. The house was demolished to make way for the West Somerville Branch Library.

Prospect Hill could almost be considered the rural countryside in the late nineteenth century. After the city decided to fill in Millers River, which had become a stagnant body of water due to the numerous slaughterhouses, soil was taken from Prospect Hill between 1873 and 1874. Only the center part of the hill was left intact, and it was here that the tower was later built.

The Ursuline Convent was a magnificent three-story building completed in 1828 on Ploughed Hill, or what was later known as Mount Benedict. The convent was fully eighty feet long, three stories high, with a large dormer, and a cupola. Here the erudite nuns taught their pupils, ironically the majority of them non-Catholics, everything which may be found necessary, useful and ornamental in society.

The Adams House stood on Winter Hill on the old Winter Hill Road, present-day Broadway. Built by Joseph Adams about 1785, it was here the Ursuline nuns took their pupils after they escaped from the convent on August 4, 1834, when it was sacked, and later burned, by the anti-Catholic mob.

The Middlesex Canal was laid out between Charlestown (later Somerville) and Lowell, with Colonel Loammi Baldwin serving as the engineer for the project. Promoted by Governor James Sullivan, for whom Sullivan Square was named, it was completed in 1803 and reduced travel time to twelve hours from Boston to Lowell. In a painting from the mid-1830s, the ruins of the Ursuline Convent can be seen on Mount Benedict, where they remained for nearly fifty years. Ironically, bricks from the convent surviveas part of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Bostons South End.