Quincy, Mass. Historical and Architectural Survey

310 Adams Street

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE
Number 310 Adams Street is included for technical reasons in the Hospital/Presidents/Cranch Hill neighborhood but it actually relates more to the history of Adams Street. All of Adams Street was a section of the old Boston-Plymouth Highway and a primary settlement area in the early days. Along this road were the primary 1634 land grants after the Mount Wollaston area became part of Boston. These grants were given on the basis of four acres per head in the family to encourage settlement.

Job Franklin Faxon, brother of Henry Hardwick Faxon, the enormously successful real estate entrepreneur and less successful temperance fanatic, was the owner of this fine house. Henry Hardwick owned many houses and stores in Quincy as well as large holdings in Boston and Chelsea. Job Faxon, a flour merchant in Boston, was married to Caroline Francis Reed and she stayed in residence in the house after his death in 1912 until at least 1923. The property is now owned by the St. Columban's Mission Society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Assessors Records.
Atlas of Norfolk County. Mass, 1876
Robinson's Atlas of Norfolk County, Mass, 1888.
Atlas of the City of Quincy, 1897.
Atlas of the City of Quincy, 1907.
Building Permits. alterations.
H. Hobart Holly, Quincy Historical Society.
Quincy City Directories.

ARCHITECTURAL SIGNIFICANCE:
This impressive residence began life in 1880. One of the visible vestiges of that period construction is an oriel window on the side elevation. In 1931, Henry M. Faxon, nephew of the owner "modernized" the house. The architects for this grand renovation were Shepard and Stearns of Boston who designed for the new owner a magnificent Colonial Revival envelope covered with the vocabulary of the Georgian style. The dominant element of the asymmetrical (another vestige of the 1880 construction) facade is the large modillioned gable filled with an oculus with radiating tracery. Below, a slightly projecting pavillion has a Palladian window with balcony which is over the recessed entrance, flanked by pilasters. The rear elevation is equally ornamented; it has a Doric portico whose pediment has decorative swags and dormers with alternating pediments. Articulating the corners of the main section of the house are large Ionic pilasters on tall bases which completed the "Colonial" look so fashionable in the 1920's and 1930's. It is a distinctive example of the Colonial Revival work of Shepard and Stearns and an important component of the Adams Street streetscape

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