History
The widowed Catherine Hammond Gibson purchased the newly filled in land for $3, 696 in 1859 in order to move away from Beacon Hill. Edward Clarke Cabot designed the building which was finished by 1860 in the Italian Renaissance style with an exterior of brownstone and red brick. She passed it on to her son Charles Hammond Gibson.
After Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., Catherine Hammond Gibson's grandson died in 1954, the house became a museum in 1957, and in 2001 was declared a National Historic Landmark. The Gibson House's landmark status is due to its claim that it is the only Victorian era row house in Boston's Back Bay to maintain the integral relationship between the exterior architectural shell and the original interior plan, with its accompanying decorative schemes. Its interior is a composite of family furnishings and pieces added to make it more complete.
Read more about this topic: Gibson House Museum
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)