Mount Pleasant is a historic two-story wood frame estate house in

Newton Centre, Massachusetts Newton Centre is one of the thirteen villages within the city of Newton in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The main commercial center of Newton Centre is a triangular area surrounding the intersections of Beacon Street, Centre S ...

, built circa 1856. It is a well-preserved example of the academic

Italianate style The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Ita ...

of architecture, with a three-bay facade and hip roof with a small gable over the centered entry, and a three-story turret. The house was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1986. The Mount Pleasant house was built for Roswell Turner, a major land owner and real estate developer in the Newton Centre area. The house and surrounding property were owned for many of the later years of the 19th century and early years of the 20th century by Charles S. Davis, another major force in the development of Newton Centre. Under Davis's ownership, much of the original estate was split off for other houses and streets to be built, while the original Mount Pleasant house remained. By 1917, Mr. Addison C. Burnham owned the house and was calling his smaller property "Jolly's Hollow". Subsequent owners continued to call it "Jolly's Hollow", at least into 2018. In January 1997, the Wilson family, owners of Jolly's Hollow/Mount Pleasant, donated 0.5 acres of the wooded portion of their property to the City of Newton for the creation of the Wilson Conservation Area. In 2012, the Wilsons donated to the Newton Conservators a conservation restriction to preserve an additional 1.5 acres of their land. This conservation land, as intended, adds a link to a popular walking trail that connects a playground, elementary school, and park nearby, and also to suburbs to the west. The walking trail is on top of the underground

Cochituate Cochituate (; ) is a census-designated place (CDP) in the town of Wayland in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 6,927 at the 2020 census, out of 13,943 in the entire town of Wayland. Geography Cochituate is loca ...

and

Sudbury Aqueduct The Sudbury Aqueduct is an aqueduct in Massachusetts. It runs for from Farm Pond at Waverly Street in Framingham to Chestnut Hill Reservoir in Boston’s Chestnut Hill neighborhood. A later built extension main runs from the Farm Pond gat ...

s (built in 1848 and 1878, respectively, to supply water to Boston and nearby municipalities). The Mount Pleasant house happens to be situated right between the two aqueducts, which both have easements under the Jolly's Hollow property. The Wilsons sold the house and property in July 2018 to the Fiete family, having originally purchased it from the Scribner family in March 1966.

References

Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Newton, Massachusetts Italianate architecture in Massachusetts Houses completed in 1856 {{NewtonMA-NRHP-stub

See also

References