Originally designed for an artist, the grand salon with colonnades is perfect for concerts, dancing and parties. Special features include arched alcoves, a finely paneled library, bas relief carvings, a skylit entry atrium with fountain, and a commanding, elegant central staircase. The kitchen, with an island, is open to the breakfast room and atrium and adjoins the family room with its French doo
rs to the terrace. The spacious second floor has a square skylit hall, five bedrooms and three baths. Updated systems include AC and gas heat and cooking. Outside, a bluestone terrace facing west overlooks 1.6 acres of gardens, lawn and woods. A sidewalk at the foot of the neighborhood leads to the village, museums, elementary school, restaurants and parks. This property is like a Sargent painting---romantic, historic, sublime!
~History of 285 Independence Road~
Still woods and pastureland, the ridge in the 1800’s remained undeveloped. At the foot of the ridge lived Louisa Alcott, whose popular novels had made her famous in her own time, and not far away Ralph Waldo Emerson lived until 1882 in the big white house where he had made history. In 1889 the artist Charles Hovey Pepper married Frances Coburn of Skowhegan, Maine. Pepper was an early modernist painter and woodcut printmaker who became a member of the Boston Art Club in 1912. The Peppers built 525 Lexington Road (the house next door), which was designed as a copy of the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The house was completed in 1901-1902. Next to it, Frances’ sister, Julia Coburn, also an artist, built #285 for herself and her mother in 1901. The two houses shared a common drive winding up the ridge from Lexington Road and formed a family compound. Mrs. Coburn was the widow of S. Coburn of Skowhegan, whose brother, Abner Coburn, had been governor of Maine during the Civil War. She and her daughter named their new estate “Ridgewold.”
The house standing today at 276 Independence, across from the current driveway for #285, was built as the carriage house for Ridgewold. Concord in the 1920’s was a remarkable hotbed of artistic activity. At an exhibition in 1925 at the Concord Art Association, the exhibitors included Frank Benson, Charles H Davis, Lillian Westcott Hale, Frederick G Hall, Charles Hovey Pepper, Charles Hawthorne and Gertrude Fisk, among many others. The opening of the exhibition was preceded by a private Saturday night view. The patronesses were Julia Coburn and a “Who’s Who” list of Concord supporters, which gives a picture of the social circle of the day: Mrs. Murray Balou, Mrs. Herbert Blanchard, Mrs. Moses Bradford, Mrs. Frederick Chase, Mrs. John Eaton, Mrs. Allen French, Mrs. Frederick Gay, Mrs. Gordon Hutchins, Mrs. Woodward Hudson, Mrs. George Keyes, Mrs. Charles Hovey Pepper, Mrs. Russell Robb, Mrs. Walter K Shaw, Mrs. B. Farnham Smith, Mrs. Louis Sohier and Mrs. Henry S. Thompson. Charles Hovey Pepper was also a member of “The Four Boston Painters,” which included Carl Gordon Cutler, Maurice Prendergast and E. Ambrose Webster. Pepper’s extensive collection of prints (including some of his own) was donated to his alma mater Colby College and to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
