Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in
1985. A historic map-sheet match is not published yet. The record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
From the record
“The Hickey - Osborne Block is a historic commercial-residential building in Peabody, Massachusetts. It is a distinctive repurposing of three residential structures, dating as far back as 1797, by raising them and building brick commercial ground floors beneath them.”
Wikipedia article Hickey-Osborne Block, CC BY-SA 4.0.
one of 350 National Register listings in Essex County · listed in 1985 · category: Building · one of 2 National Historic Landmarks in Essex County.
National Register reference number.85002416- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
Mattresses and Feathers Renovated. Goods Called For and Returned Promptly. No. 15 Walnut Street, Peabody, Mass. - Cleanliness not only is essential to health, but it also preserves and renders more endurable every kin i of fabric and cloth. This fact is equally true whether applied to garments or the carpets, bedding and similar household goods. Few people realize how much longer these materials could be made to last if cleaned more regularly and carefully. The Peabody Laundry and Steam Carpet Cleaning Works has now for nine years demonstrated its ability to handle every class ol work in these lines in the most modern and satisfactory style. The laundry business was established in 1883, and the entire enterprise has been under Mr. Charles A. Sanger's efficient management since 1884. Large and thoroughly equipped premises are occupied. A 12 horse-power engine and 30 horsepower boiler furnishes steam power, and the machinery throughout is of the latest and best type. The steam carpet beating department occupies a separate building. The^laundry work in all lines is guaranteed to be on a par with the best anywhere in this country, while the prompt service and low prices are points worth noting carefully. Of late years the services of the Steam Carpet Beating Works have been increasing steadily in popularity. The prices are as low as those afforded by any other kind of service, while in efficiency and thorough care the advantages of the Steam Beating Works are greatly superior to all others. They call for and deliver goods on request in Peabody, Salem and Danvers, taking in charge not only ingrains, tapestries, brussels, axminsters, wiltons, etc., but also fine rugs and laces, mat^tresses, feathers, and any household paraphernalia needing careful and thorough cleaning. An examination of the facilities and rates of these well conducted works will convince anyone of the superior advantages offered by them.
Flowers possess a perennial cliarm for all cultivated people, and it is one of the triumphs of modern skill that we are now enabled to obtain them in abundance at any season of the year. Among the floral establishments of Peabody and vicinity that of Mr. J. M. Ward has long held a prominent and esteemed position. The business was established by Mr. Ward in 1875 and has made steady progress under his management from the start. Four large green-houses are now utilized for the cultivation of the varied floral stock of this house, the space of 4,000 square feet being devoted entirely to this purpose. Every variety of favorite flowers, including choice roses, carnations, lilies, pansies, etc., etc., are kept constantly on hand. Cut flowers and bouquets are sold at unexcelled prices. Special attention is given to funeral and memorial designs. A fine variety of palms, ferns, selaginellas and all kinds of potted plants are ready for use at any time. The immense variety and beauty of Mr. Ward's siock. as well as his uniformly liberal prices, make it a matter both of pleasure and economy to make use of his large facilities in these lines. Mr. Ward is a native of England and one of Peabody's most substantial and esteemed business men.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 83 fires within 5 miles of Hickey--Osborne Block between
2003 and 2020, burning about 279 acres in total. 1 started naturally. 4 were recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Recreation and ceremony
28
Smoking
13
Equipment and vehicle use
10
Misuse of fire by a minor
6
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
6
Debris and open burning
6
Fireworks
5
Arson/incendiarism
4
Power generation/transmission/distribution
2
Natural
1
Railroad operations and maintenance
1
Other causes
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. Museums hold 9,938 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Hickey--Osborne Block between 1800 and
1975: 4,114 Plantae, 3,151 Animalia, 1,074 Fungi, 922 Chromista, 439 Unrecorded, 189 Bacteria, 49 Protozoa. 12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by A B. Proper, A H HIGGINSON, A. A. Eaton and others. Each is a
physical object with a catalogue
number, and each entry opens the museum's record. This is what was
collected and kept, not a survey of what lives here - nothing can be
concluded from a species being absent.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
14 workings within 5 miles of Hickey--Osborne Block: 5 plants, 4 past producers, 3 producers, 1 unknown.
8 still produce. What was taken out: Stone, Crushed/Broken, Sand and Gravel, Construction, Zirconium, Iron. Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
Peabody, the town this property stands in, in 47 storm reports between 1993 and 2025: 22 thunderstorm wind, 11 hail, 6 flood, 4 lightning.
The reports record 1 injury. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
In Lynn, Alley and Commercial streets experienced significant flooding. A car was stranded on Chatham Street. In Peabody, a car was stranded near Foster and Spring Streets. Shaws Lane and Oak Streets were flooded.
Several cars were stranded due to flooding on Canal Street in Salem, as well as at Salem State College. Urban flooding was more severe in Peabody, where Fountain Street was flooded and voluntary evacuations took place. Several streets near the center of Peabody were also closed due to flooding.
At 10:33 AM EST, Quail Road in South Peabody was closed due to flooding. At 10:52 AM EST, Lynnfield Street was closed due to flooding. At 11:07 AM EST, a car was reported trapped in floodwaters on Lynnfield Street. At 11:14 AM a car was trapped in floodwaters on Lake Street near U.S. Route 1; Lake Street was reported closed soon after. At 11:33 AM EST, a house on Batchelder Avenue was reported to have 4 feet of water in the basement.
Trees and wires were downed on Winona and Corey Drives, and Lake, Forest, Baldwin, Wheatland, and Lowell Streets. So many trees were downed on Lowell Street that the street was closed.
Trees and wires were downed on several streets in Lynn and Peabody, including on Greenwood Road in Peabody and on Herschel Street in Lynn. One of the trees on Herschel Street landed on a car.
In Peabody, a tree was down on a truck on Norfolk Avenue. A tree was down on power lines at both Lynnfield Street and Columbia Blvd. A tree was down on Bartlett Street.
Two trees down in Salem Willows Park. Numerous dime-size hail stones fell at approximately 1845 EST in West Peabody with one or two stones just under the size of a quarter as measured by the son of a NWS meteorologist. Rainfall in Peabody was 1.68 inches.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
From the nomination file
4,585 words on record
When this property was proposed for the
National Register, someone wrote the case for it: what the building is,
and why it matters. That document is a federal record in the public domain.
It is quoted below word for word, never summarised. The text was read off the scanned case file by machine, so the
occasional stray character is the recogniser's and the 1970s
typewriter's.
Description of the property
The Hickey-Osborne Block is located at 38-60 Main Street between Peabody Square and Wallis Street. The block is composed of three pre-Civil War single-family residences, the John Upton House (ca. 1798), the Daniel Dodge House (ca. 1835), and the Ebenezer Sprague House (ca. 1835), that were raised onto a story of brick ground-floor commercial space during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and unified by two, two-story, brick infill additions in 1923. Together, the three houses form a visually coherent commercial block. The main facade of the Hickey-Osborne Block faces Main Street (south) with the rear elevation on Mill and Wallis Streets (north). Portions of the individual buildings' end walls are visible above the two-story additions.
The three component buildings are of frame construction. - Originally sheathed with clapboard, they are now primarily covered by asphalt shingles or red brick veneer. Trim is of wood and brownstone. The earliest of three original structures in the Hickey-Osborne Block, the John Upton House (ca. 1797), is the easternmost building in the trio. The house is a narrow, five-bay frame structure with a pitched gable roof that was originally two-and-one-half stories in height. The Main Street elevation has a clapboard facade that was sheathed in asphalt shingles in the 1960s. There are five symmetrically arranged 6/6 sash windows at the second- and third-story levels, and a projecting storefront (added ca. 1897) at the ground level.
A small, two-story, flat-roofed ell of unknown date projects from the building's east end. The commercial.space was added ca. 1897 when the John Upton House was elevated onto ground-floor commercial space and became known as the Osborne Block. The Osborne Block is thus.a three-and-one-half- The original storefront was remodeled in the 1960s with new aluminum and brick piers.
(in one paragraph) Builder/Architect unknown The Hickey-Osborne Block retains integrity of design, location, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association, and represents a distinctive architectural response to the adaptation of residential buildings for commercial purposes in downtown Peabody. The John Upton House, built for Upton on Main Street ca. 1797, and the adjacent houses built by Daniel Dodge and Ebenezer Sprague Upton, both ca. 1835, were originally constructed as individual residences: - This trio of houses represents downtown Peabody'smost distinguished extant pre-Civil War residential architecture. Al though these houses are significant as individual residences, are also significant for their later alterations and uses.
In 1923, the Dodge House and the Upton House were raised one story onto ground-floor commercial space and linked with the John Upton House elevated onto a ground-floor storefront ca. 1897). This commercial-residential complex, known as the Hickey-Osborne Block, is a visually coherent illustration of the evolution of downtown Peabody from a late eighteenth-century community of scattered small shops and residences to a major commercial center during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The growth of the downtown reflects the transformation of Peabody's economy from one based in agriculture on to an economy that by the late nineteenth century wasdominated by large-scale manufacturing.
The Hickey Osborne Block meets Criteria A and C for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, and is significant on the local level. In 1797, about the time when John Upton erected his frame dwelling, the main street of South Danvers (now Peabody) was known as "the road from Andover to Salem." Laid out in 1647, the section of the road from the present Peabody Square to the Salem town line was orimarily residential. South Danvers' commercial district was centered around Peabody Square along a short stretch of the road.
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 85002416, 19 pages, held by the National Archives in Record
Group 79. See the
catalogue record.
Listed places nearby
6 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Specimens. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), https://www.gbif.org/. Only records licensed CC0 or CC BY are used. Records licensed CC BY-NC are excluded because this site carries advertising. Images are checked individually and any whose licence is non-commercial, no-derivatives or unreadable is refused.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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