Hooper-Lee Nichols House

The Hooper-Lee-Nichols House was constructed in c. 1685 and has undergone major alterations. The seventeenth century character of the house is immediately apparent only in the massive central chimney, a huge construction twelve feet square with six flues protruding above the roof. The house was remodelled in the Georgian style in c. 1745, at which time the roof was raised, the vestibule shutters and quoins added to the exterior, and one wall stuccoed. The pedimented gable of the strongly projecting vestibule is supported by paired pilasters flanking an unusually wide and low single door of ie mankingoan thg nine panels.

The window frames project strongly from the facade with heavy cornices and moulded sills; the shutters are in the heavy scale of the eighteenth century and have fixed louvers. Windows are eight over twelve in the first two stories, and eight over eight in the main house, which is covered in roughcast scored to resemble ashlar masonry. The low pitched roof is screened by a wooden parapet added in 1860. The solid panels of the parapet alternate with balusters to emphasize the spacing of the bays. The interior of the house reflects the extensive remodellings that were carried out in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Both the east and west first floor rooms have panelling, mantels, and window'seats added between 1745 and 1760.

The boxed summer beams run longitudinally in the east room and transversely in the west room. The 'paper in the west first floor front room shows views of the Bosphorus and perhaps Istanbul, and may have been the work of Dufour of Paris. The "Bay of Naples" paper in the west front room on the second floor is better known, and is definitely a Dufour creation, printed in France c. 1820.

c. 1680, c= 1745 BUILDER/ARCHITECT Various The Hooper-Lee-Nichols House is the oldest of seven mansions on Brattle Street in Cambridge associated with Tory figures of the pre-Revolutionary period. It is one of three houses originally constructed in the seventeenth century remaining in Cambridge and, although altered numerous times in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it retains its importance as a largely eighteenth century mansion. The property is currently operated as an historic house museum by the Cambridge Historical Society. The house was constructed c. 1685 on a farm in what was then Watertown by Dr. Richard Hooper. Dr.

Hooper died in 1691, and by this time the house had already been seriously damaged by fire and "wormes." The earliest existing element of the house, its great central chimney stack twelve feet square built of granite and brick, dates fnom this period. r. Hooper's widow, who had a license to operate an inn, thoroughly repaired and altered the house in 1716-1717 before passing it to her son, Dr. Henry Hooper; the present stairs and a fragment of panelling under the present fireplace wall in the left chamber date from this remodelling. In 1733, a Boston merchant, Cornelius Waldo, became owner of the house and after unsuccessfully advertising it for rent "to a Gentleman for a Country Seat", apparently occupied it himself.

The present third story and much of the present panelling and interior trim were added about 1745. In 1748, the house was purchased by Joseph Lee, a Judge in the Court of Common Pleas of Middlesex County, a Iounder of Christ Church, Cambriage, in 1159, and a Mandamus Councillor in 1774.