Rangeley: a romantic residential park in Winchester, Massachusetts

Magazine Antiques, August, 1997 by Maureen Meister

The styles of the houses, however, departed from the mid-nineteenth-century concept of what was appropriate for romantic residential development. Downing's houses conveyed associations with country living; Rangeley's did not. Indeed, they greatly resembled the brick town houses Rand and his fellow Boston architects were building in the city. Moreover, following Bostonians' long tradition of admiring and borrowing from English architecture, they also alluded to trends in England. Brick Gothic houses were common in English suburbs in the 1860s and 1870s. Those in North Oxford, for example, are virtually interchangeable with the ones at Rangeley.(15)

Rangeley was conceived to be attractive to a certain social class, and as Skillings maintained ownership of the houses and leased them, he controlled who lived there. Like the much larger romantic communities, such as Llewellyn Park, Rangeley featured a defined sense of place and was bounded on one side by railroad tracks and on another by a stone wall [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED]. The houses were large but not mansions. Generally about forty feet by forty feet in plan, they included a parlor, library or back parlor, dining room, and kitchen on the first floor; four bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor; and rooms for servants on the third. As Skillings intended, virtually all of his tenants were businessmen and professionals who worked in Boston. Among them were Charles Ammi Cutter (1837-1903), the librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, and William M. Parker (1821-1891), the superintendent of the Boston and Lowell Railroad.(16)

Rangeley's success can by gauged in part by the publicity it received. One of its houses was illustrated in American Architect and Building News of June 23, 1877 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED], accompanied by the following commentary:

The estate embraces about twenty-five acres of diversified hill and vale, wood and lawn, and the plan has been to treat it after the manner of a park, without public streets or fences to destroy its breadth or privacy. The result thus far has been eminently successful, and seems worthy of imitation in other instances.(17)

On March 30, 1881, the Boston Herald ran a lengthy article entitled "Suburban Homes," which compared Rangeley to Bedford Park, a community outside London designed by Edward William Godwin (1833-1886) and Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912) and begun in 1875. Describing Rangeley, the newspaper noted:

All the houses stand free in the grounds, there being no fences or boundary lines of any kind. The privileges of the entire place are shared free and in common by all the tenants. A pleasant and agreeable colony is thus maintained, and its character is assured letting, and not selling, the houses. The income is entirely applied to keeping up the place....By his action Mr. Skillings had an untold influence in firmly establishing the character of the whole town, and made Winchester one of the most beautiful and desirable places of residence near Boston.