Spring Lawn

Somebody went through Spring Lawn about 1905 with a camera and photographed it room by room — the dining room, the parlor looking north-east, the view from the hall, a chamber, a double chamber, the nursery, the billiard room, the long awninged promenade. Sixteen plates, and the house is complete in them. As of this writing a developer has proposed pulling the building down and putting up a replica.

I. The Boston architect

Spring Lawn was built in 1904 for John E. Alexandre, on the site of the old Sedgwick School for Girls at 10 Kemble Street. The architect was Guy Lowell (1870–1927), MIT and the École des Beaux-Arts, and one of the most considerable architects in Boston: he built the Museum of Fine Arts there and the New York County Courthouse on Foley Square.

What he gave Alexandre was Beaux-Arts and plain about it — stucco with stone quoining and a band between the stories, and a porte cochère carried on fluted Ionic columns. The Lenox Library’s exterior plates show it from the drive under a big tree, and one close view of nothing but the portico.

The Alexandres waited for it in the Frelinghuysen house up the street.

II. Sixteen rooms

The interior set is the reason this page exists. It is not a decorator’s portfolio and it is not a family album; it is a methodical walk through a finished house, and almost nothing on this site matches it.

A chimneypiece with an oval portrait of a woman set into the overmantel, flowers in the grate. A bedroom with a four-poster and a chintz canopy and a doll on the bed. A long promenade under a striped awning, running the length of a terrace, with cane furniture down one side. A billiard table under a low shaded lamp, with a fireplace and glazed cupboards behind. A barrel-vaulted hall opening into a lit room beyond. A parlor with a piano, ranks of plates hung on the chimney breast, and a wall of books. A terrace with clipped standards in tubs, looking out at the hills.

The catalogue titles them all in the same form — “Spring Lawn: J. E. Alexandre, Lenox Mass., parlor looking N.E.” — which reads like a photographer’s own list rather than a librarian’s.

III. Six institutions and a lawsuit

Alexandre’s daughter sold the house to Mrs. Arthur F. Schermerhorn, who renamed it Schermeer. In 1957 it was deeded to the Lenox School, and it later passed to Bible Speaks College — the same body that had the Frelinghuysen house from 1976. Between 1987 and 1993 it belonged to Elizabeth Dovydenas, following litigation with that ministry. Then the National Music Foundation from 1993, Shakespeare & Company from 1999 to 2005, and James C. Jurney Sr. after that.

IV. A replica

A developer has proposed demolishing the house and building a copy of it as part of a housing development; the Lenox Historical Commission has to agree before anything happens. That proposal is live and this page does not try to say how it will end.

What can be said is narrower and more useful. Sixteen photographs of the inside of this house, made about a hundred and twenty years ago, are public, free to use, and now downloadable here at full resolution. Whatever is standing on Kemble Street in ten years, the rooms are recorded.

Sources

Photographs: Lenox Library Association, sixteen items via Digital Commonwealth, titles and dates quoted exactly as catalogued, licensed CC BY-NC-ND; Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, one plate, LC-D4-72947, no known restrictions on publication. Text: lenoxhistory.org, “10 Kemble St., Springlawn, 1904,” for the 1904 build, John E. Alexandre, the Sedgwick School for Girls on the site, Guy Lowell and his training, the stucco and stone quoining and the porte cochère, and the ownership sequence — the daughter’s sale to Mrs. Arthur F. Schermerhorn and the name Schermeer, the deeding to Lenox School in 1957, Bible Speaks College, Elizabeth Dovydenas 1987–93, the National Music Foundation 1993–99, Shakespeare & Company 1999–2005 and James C. Jurney Sr. from 2005; Wikipedia, “Spring Lawn,” for Guy Lowell’s Museum of Fine Arts and New York courthouse and for the Beaux-Arts and Classical Revival description; The Berkshire Eagle for the demolition-and-replica proposal now before the Lenox Historical Commission. No Olmsted job for this estate appears in the firm’s Berkshire list.