Summer Street
MACRIS NWB.M · area form
Summer Street runs three blocks from High Street to Merrimac Street, beside St. Paul's Church. According to the survey it was laid out on 21 March 1766 through land that John and Moses Ordway had divided into house lots. It had no cross streets at first: Birch Street was laid out in 1796, and Washington Street (then Union Street) was extended to Winter Street in 1839.
In the early 1900s the Misses Emery set out to buy houses on the street as they came up for sale and give them to St. Paul's Church. Two houses were bought between 1907 and 1909 and torn down in 1913, and No. 35, acquired in 1921 after the church burned in 1920, was demolished in July 1934.
Building Route 1 in 1934–1935 took every house on the Winter Street side, which the form says held the larger homes and a brick sidewalk. A fire on the night of 18 May 1934 finished off the Hennessey house at Summer and Merrimac, a pre-Revolutionary saltbox already partly taken down.
Summarized from the Massachusetts Historical Commission's area form. See the MACRIS record ↗
