Quincy, Mass. Historical and Architectural Survey

116 Crescent Street

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
West Quincy, in its early days, was known as the Woods District. In 1644 it was the site of the first productive iron furnace in America. But the West Quincy we know now is the result of the phenomenal expansion of the granite industry which began in the early 19th century, flourished well into the 20th, and achieved such milestones as the first commercial railway in 1876. Hiking through the now silent quarries it is hard to imagine that in 1837 fully one sixth of Quincy's 3000 persons were engaged in the quarrying industry. Historian Daniel Munro Wilson, writing in 1925, tries to capture some of flavor of the change: "Great elevations are being leveled and the very roots of the mountains are being torn out, but the supply is inexhaustible. Stone sheds for the hammering and polishing of the obdurate material have multiplied, so that within the last twenty years these and the houses of the workmen have quite altered the face of the country." (quoted in Holly, Quincy: 350 Years, p. 57.)

William E. Badger of the well-known Badger Bros. quarrying and granite machine manufacturing company was the owner of 116 Crescent Street. The firm, composed of three other brothers, Charles L., George L., and Fred L., owned and operated the Wigwam quarry, one of the oldest in Quincy. Yielding medium to dark granite, the Wigwam quarry supplied stone for the New York Exchange Building and the New Orleans Custom House. The Badger family retained ownership of this property until after 1935.

BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Assessors Records.
William Churchill Edwards. Historic Quincy, Massachusetts, 1957, p. 116-123.
H. Hobart Holly. Quincy: 350 Years, 1974, p. 51.
H. Hobart Holly. "Quincy's Granite Hills Were Golden". Quincy History, Spring, 1980.
Walter O. Nisu1a. "Granite Drew the Finnish to Quincy". Quincy History, Spring, 1984.
Quincy Patriot Ledger, Souvenir Edition, 1899, p. 17.

ARCHITECTURAL SIGNIFICANCE:
The Queen Anne Style was the dominant domestic style from about 1880 until 1900. The style began in England with the work of Richard Norman Shaw. It harkened back to pre-18th century Queen Anne classically oriented architecture and back to picturesque late medieval structures of England. At the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Americans were first exposed to English Queen Anne architecure. Within the decade, the style had replaced the previous foreign derived styles, such as Gothic Revival, Italianate and French Second Empire (Mansardic). The salient characteristic of the style was the emphasis on irregularity of plan, of massing, of color, of windows types and of wall textures. There were many wall overhangs, types of roofs and elaborate chimneys; ornamentation was ubiquitous. With time, picturesque elements were replaced with classic detailing and soon after,the late 1890s the Shingle Style and the Colonial Revival Style were the contemporary styles.

The residence at 116 Crescent is an interesting example of the style. Were it not for the filling in of the large gable arched recess and the vinylizing of the ground floor, it would have been a particularly fine example. The facade is composed of a large overhanging gable with shingled brackets at the ends, a second floor angular bay window within the wall of V shaped shingles and a large warp-around porch on the ground floor. This porch is supported by typical turned posts of the period, has decorated brackets at the corners and an ornamental balustraded and frieze. The fenestration is irregular, composed of one over one windows, and many with the typical Queen Anne windows, small square lights surrounding a solid pane over a plain pane as the bay window. The property was listed in the previous Quincy Inventory.

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