Stonehurst

The post I have today is about the Robert Treat Paine Estate in the City of Waltham Massachusetts, a nice place to visit for anyone who is into old houses with alot of history.

Born in 1835 , the great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He acquired a large fortune early in life through his legal practice and also Railroad and Mining investments.

Designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and Frederick Law Olmsted, Stonehurst the Robert Treat Paine Estate, is the only museum devoted to these two pioneering figures in American architectural and landscape design history. At Stonehurst, these close friends and collaborators forged a uniquely American architecture by focusing on the intimate, almost seamless integration of the natural and man-made worlds. Richardson and Olmsted, like Winslow Homer, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, were among the great artists of the post-Civil War era who asserted cultural independence from Europe by cultivating an aesthetic deeply rooted in the American landscape.

In 1883, Robert Treat Paine, Jr. and his wife Lydia Lyman Paine commissioned Richardson and Olmsted to design a great addition to their summer house in Waltham, Mass. The Paines were a socially minded family. Robert Treat Paine founded building and loan associations and institutes to improve the quality of life of the working class. Stonehurst embodied the ideals the Paine family held dear and to which they believed every American had a right: an abundance of healthy, clean air and a spiritually uplifting and restorative environment. The Paine family grounds appropriately became a public park in 1974, when descendants donated the 109-acre estate to the City of Waltham