Maria Baldwin House
- Year
- 1845
- Style
- Greek Revival
- City
- Boston, MA
The Maria Baldwin House is the northern half of a two-family house at 196 Prospect Street in Cambridge, home to educator Maria Louise Baldwin from 1916 onward, when she became the first female African-American principal in a Massachusetts public school at Cambridge's Agassiz Grammar School. As principal, she supervised twelve white teachers over a student body that was 98% white. The school was later renamed the Maria Baldwin School in her honor, and the house was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
the building
The house's northern half. The Baldwin House is only the northern half of a two-family, 2 1/2-story wood-frame duplex on a brick foundation; the building is six bays wide beneath a side-gable roof, with two-over-two sash windows filling the plain bays outside the paired entrances.
the style
The paired front doorways, sheltered by a portico raised on three Ionic columns and flanked by sidelight windows and pilasters, are the house's clearest Greek Revival gesture, a formal, temple-front vocabulary applied to an otherwise plain wood-frame duplex.
More on Greek Revivalsignificance
The Maria Baldwin House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976 for its association with Maria Baldwin, and the school she led, the Agassiz Grammar School, was later renamed the Maria Baldwin School in her honor.
nearby
- Beth Israel Synagogue
- William R. Jones House
- St. Peter's Episcopal Church
- Clifton Merriman Post Office Building
- George Wyatt House
- East Cambridge Savings Bank