News & Events
A Gift of Exhibits and Site Signs
Fundraising is complete for exhibits and site signs at Stonehurst! The Friends of Stonehurst have fully matched a $95,000 federal grant for this project with donations from individuals and private foundations. Thank you to the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mass Humanities and all who donated!
The Friends worked closely with the property owner, the City of Waltham, over many years to fulfill this key programmatic and capital goals in the City's Strategic Plan for Stonehurst. Federal reviewers recognized the project as a model for creating a meaningful visitor experience in our country's most prized historical and architectural spaces, with utmost deference to their preservation and inherent beauty.
The Friends have presented the project as a gift to the City of Waltham and look forward to its acceptance by the Mayor and City Council.
New exhibits will be installed in 2012.
Storer Trails
Go for a walk on the Storer Conservation Lands surrounding Stonehurst and you will notice new temporary trail blazes marking the century-old trails. The blazes also mark a first step in an effort to improve stewardship, preservation and enjoyment of this 109-acre natural resource, abutting Stonehurst, the Lyman Estate, and three schools. Soon you will see an updated trail map on line.
This effort is made possible by trail users who held a benefit dinner for the Friends of Stonehurst at The Elephant Walk last spring and by the arrival of Brandies Environmental Studies intern Amira Mintz-Morgenthau.
The newly marked trails are slated to have self-guided walking tours, thanks to Brandeis Professor Eric Olson and his Field Biology students. Olson's class is developing a model self-guided nature walk of interesting wildflowers, shrubs and trees like wild sasparilla, the American chestnut, partridge berry, spice bush, and lesser burdock, the inspiration for Velcro. We dream of future guides focused on the history of the land and the people who tended it.
Ted Storer, a grandson of Robert Treat Paine, had the foresight to shield this land from development and donate it, along with "Stonehurst" the Paine house, to the City of Waltham with conservation restrictions in 1974. The Waltham Conservation Commission holds the restrictions and oversees the property to which the City added another 25.5 acres in the 1990s.
Trail names on the Storer Conservation Lands evoke its 18th and 19th century history when, for example, farmers would lead cattle from the Lyman farm, across the hill pasture, through the wood lot, along "Bull Run" to the Bull Pasture (now the site of the High School). Stone walls outline the boundaries of the Great Dividends of 1634-1640 when British leaders granted lots to the colonists who first settled here. Vernal pools, club mosses, and geological features recall a more distant prehuman history of Waltham, a place name which means "a home in the woods."
Back-of-the-House Living
Architect H.H. Richardson joked about how millionaire Robert Treat Paine asked him to "build a house for myself, my wife and my ten servants." In the end, he designed Stonehurst for seven family members, overnight guests and (in an earlier wing) seven live-in female servants.
Tufts Museum Studies intern Kathryn Khanwalkar and volunteer architect Norman Adams have begun to refurbish spaces and select artifacts that help tell the story of the women who lived and worked in the "back of the house." Norman discovered internal windows bringing natural light to inner spaces, original wainscoting perforated by mysterious cuts possibly for a long-forgotten system of pipes and wires, and "shadows" of long shelves and racks of hooks to house the belongings of the seven young women who shared the servants' bath. Kathryn discovered how the servant call bell system was set up to include personal rings--cow bell, school bell, sleigh bell, and gong--for at least four different co-workers who were always on call.
The small bedroom of a representative Irish seamstress will help share the collective story of the many young recent European immigrants employed by the Paines in the 1880s and 1890s. Of the many lives we have begun to glean from census records, vital records, letters and diaries, Katie Frasier stands out as a governess for the Paine children who later married and opened a dressmaking shop and a boarding house. The room where she may have lived will house a steamer trunk to commemorate the young woman's journey across the Atlantic, objects showing religious differences between the front of the house and the back of the house, furniture handed down from her employers, the livery that she would have worn on the job and a pedal-powered sewing machine.
National Trust Partner Place
Stonehurst is now a Partner Place of the National Trust for Historic Preservation! As an individual historic site, Stonehurst benefits from the national following and excellent outreach program of the National Trust. We help spread the reach of the Trust and enhance their offerings. National Trust members receive discounts on admission to all Partner Places listed on their website http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites where Stonehurst is currently featured.