The Edward Devotion House

There are places we deliberately seek out because of their history, and then there are places that have been sitting right in front of us for years before we finally notice them.

That was the Edward Devotion House for me.

I have visited Brookline countless times. I know this part of Harvard Street well and have spent many hours enjoying the little shops, restaurants, and cafés nearby. Yet somehow, tucked just a short distance away behind its white picket fence, I had never noticed this house or the small sign explaining what it was.  And then, this year, I discovered that I had been walking past one of the oldest surviving buildings in Brookline.

The Edward Devotion House at 347 Harvard Street appears today much as an eighteenth-century Georgian house. The present exterior dates largely from around 1740, but investigations of the building have revealed something much older inside: incorporated into the house is a timber frame dating to about 1680. That earlier structure may have been built by Edward Devotion or his son John.

That takes the story back to a very different Brookline. When Edward Devotion settled here in the mid-1600s, this was not the busy community we know today. Brookline was still known as Muddy River, a rural settlement associated with Boston. The Devotion property included more than 100 acres, with apple orchards and pasture for sheep and cattle. Harvard Street itself was already an important early road, laid out in 1662 and later known as the Great Road to Cambridge. 

Around 1740, Solomon Hill acquired the property and probably constructed the house we recognize today around the earlier frame. Its gambrel roof, central chimney, projecting window cornices, and pedimented entrance are characteristic of Georgian architecture.

The Devotion name also became closely connected with education in Brookline. Edward Devotion, who died in 1744, left instructions that money remaining from his estate be used toward building or maintaining a school near the center of town

The house itself nearly disappeared. The Town of Brookline purchased the property in 1891 as part of the site for a new school, and there was consideration of demolishing the old house. Preservation efforts saved it, and the Brookline Historical Society eventually took responsibility for it as a historic house museum. The Society has been associated with the house since the early twentieth century. 

Today, the Edward Devotion House sits in an environment its earliest residents could never have imagined. The farms and orchards are gone. Harvard Street has become one of Brookline’s busy commercial corridors, and shops, cafés, schools, houses, and traffic surround this little remnant of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Brookline. Perhaps that is what made discovering it so enjoyable for me.

I had not traveled somewhere specifically looking for an important historic house. I had been here many times before. It was right there, barely a block from places I already knew and enjoyed, waiting for me to finally notice it. After all my visits to Brookline, it took until this year for me to discover one of its oldest surviving houses.  It is another reminder of something I have come to appreciate more and more, sometimes history is not hidden at all. We simply haven’t noticed it yet.