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 Building at 8-22 Graves Avenue is a historic rowhouse just outside the downtown area of Northampton, Massachusetts. The Queen Anne style brick rowhouse was built in 1887 for Doctor Silas R.”
Wikipedia article Building at 8-22 Graves Avenue, CC BY-SA 4.0.
one of 32 National Register listings in Hampshire County · listed in 1985 · category: Building.
National Register reference number.85002784- 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.
The city of Northampton has for several years established its cruslaing works near the north line of the town and at a distance from railroads, and works the Hatfield tonalite or hornblendic granite, which is a partly decomposed rock, more brittle than the trap, and in many ways an inferior rock for road ballast. The city has access beside the road or railroad within its own limits to several better ledges than the one it works now. In 1897 the city of Ware opened a quarry on the Coys Hill dike on the mountain side east of the railroad station. The dike is here 5 rods wide, favorably situated for quanying, and will furnish the best material in inexhaustible quantity.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 81 fires within 5 miles of Building at 8--22 Graves Avenue between
2001 and 2020, burning about 321 acres in total. 6 started naturally. 5 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
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
26
Equipment and vehicle use
21
Debris and open burning
13
Recreation and ceremony
10
Natural
6
Arson/incendiarism
5
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 6,185 specimens
collected within 10 miles of Building at 8--22 Graves Avenue between 1781 and
1975: 3,174 Plantae, 1,564 Fungi, 1,239 Animalia, 134 Chromista, 64 Protozoa, 9 Unrecorded, 1 Bacteria. 12 distinct Species records are shown.
Collected by A V Osmun, A., A. Albee 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
22 workings within 5 miles of Building at 8--22 Graves Avenue: 11 producers, 11 past producers.
11 still produce. What was taken out: Brick Clay, Clay, Stone, Dimension, Sand and Gravel, Construction. 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
Northampton, the town this property stands in, in 36 storm reports between 1995 and 2025: 18 thunderstorm wind, 6 flood, 4 hail, 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.
Record flooding along the Mill River caused extensive flooding in Northampton. The river crested at 15.6 feet on the 16th, which was the highest crest on record, and well above the previous record crest of 13.7 feet which occurred in October, 2005. Many roads near the river were closed and some evacuations took place as flood waters threatened nearby homes and businesses.|Minor flooding also affected the mainstem Connecticut River through Northampton. A crest of 119 feet was recorded at 430 pm on the 17th (flood stage is 112 feet).
After receiving roughly four and a half inches of rain from Tropical Storm Irene, an overtopped dike resulted in the closure of West Street in Northampton. At exit 24 on Route 5, there was five to six feet of water flooding the road, with two cars floating down the road.
In the Florence section of Northampton, a 50 foot by 50 foot wooden permanent pavilion structure was blown crooked at a landmark restaurant/tavern. The footings, which were lifted and bent, were attached by a metal bracket to concrete. The pavilion can accomodate 18 tables with 4 people per table. The building inspector classified the damage as $20,000. Slightly farther to the southeast, a 50 ft by 75 ft. section of roofing, including insulation and rubber membrane, was peeled off of the Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School. There was little in the way of water damage inside the school. The Northampton building inspector rated the roof damage as $30,000. Still farther to the southeast, a tree was down on Washington Avenue, as reported by amateur radio.
Numerous trees were downed in Northampton, including several on Summer Street and one on Massasoit Street which fell on wires. Large trees also were downed in Easthampton, including one that fell on a house and a car on Chestnut Street.
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.
Named in the fire insurance atlases
Sanborn surveyors printed an index of the
town's establishments at the front of each atlas. This property is named in
one, read straight off the scanned sheet.
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
8-22 Graves Avenue is a two-and-a-half story brick rowhouse, twenty-four bays long by two bays deep. The plan is rectangular and contains eight single-family dwellings. The building is Queen Anne/Panel Brick in style. It occupies a level, unlandscaped lot along the north side of Graves Avenue, a dead-end street running in an east-west direction perpendicular to Market Street. Graves Avenue is located just outside the northwest corner of the Downtown Northampton Historic District. Other buildings on:Graves Avenue are late 19th century residences, among which are single and multiple-family structures, including double houses, three deckers and two other rowhouses, both smaller and of more recent construction than 8-22 Graves and both of frame construction.
3TEVA 227300 8-22 Graves Avenue is constructed of red brick, some of it in deteriorated condition. The building rests on a half-story brick basement capped with a three-brick-wide water table course. The dominant feature of the facade is the repeated rhythm of projecting window bays and porches breaking out of the plane of the front wall. The walls are laid up in common bond and are ornamented at the first and second floor levels with a double band of tar-dipped bricks. The end gable walls incorporate a sawtoothed course of angled brick between the tar-dipped bands. The roof of the building is a shallow gable with a plain wooden-boxed cornice and short gable returns.
The roof contains five chimneys, centered on the ridge and evenly spaced, one on each of the end walls and the remainder at the party walls of the interior units. To the rear of the building are four large projecting ells each four bays wide and two bays deep. These are constructed of brick laid in common bond with no other ornament.
(in one paragraph) Builder/Architect unknown 8-22 Graves Avenue possesses integrity of_location, design, setting, materials, workmanship and association. The rowhouses at 8-22 Graves Avenue were constructed ca. 1887 during a period of tremendous growth and development expanded significantly in the period from 1870-1915. 8-22 Graves Avenue is typical of the speculative multiple-family tenement housing that grew up in its rowhouse form and brick construction, brick rowhousing never having been a meets National Register criteria A and C as a well preserved Queen Anne/Panel Brick style rowhouse and an excellent example of late 19th century speculative housing related to the development of Northampton as a commercial and transportation center.
8-22 Graves Avenue was built on one of twelve lots laid out in 1884. The land originally comprised the Elisha Graves Homestead and was the last of the neighborhood's homesteads to be subdivided. The subdivision plan is a good example of late 19th century planning and development. As the attached "Plan of a New Street and Lots Belonging to H.B. Graves" indicates, the lots were regularly laid out squares averaging 75'x80'. The property at 8-22 Graves occupies a portion of Lot 1 and Lots 3 and 5.: The first owner of the building was Silas Cooley, who bought the property from H.B. Graves shortly after the subdivision was platted. Cooley, a young entrepreneur: in real estate , and the tobacco business, was responsible for the construction of the Graves Avenue building.
By the end of the century, Cooley, a native of nearby Sunderland, Massachusetts, had established himself as one of Northampton's leading citizens and a major 1andowner.
Quoted from the National Register nomination
for reference 85002784, 17 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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