Ashburnham - Part 3

Beside each other on Robinson Street, two large red brick, two and a half storey houses were built twenty years apart.  Both were owned by wealthy Ashburnham business families.  It's interesting to see how the popular architectural styles changed in just a few decades.  One hundred years later, houses built in the 1960s were much smaller than those built in the 1980s.  Not so different from Victorian times!
The Henry Calcutt House, 1866

Victorian gothic with gingerbread style wood trim.  The house remained in the Calcutt family from 1869 until the late 1940s.  Calcutt owned a brewery on the Otonabee River, just west of his house.  Calcutt also owned a steamship line which ran along the river to Rice Lake.  His vessels provided a necessary waterway link for railway passengers, and also ran recreational excursions.
Lakeview, the John C. Sullivan House, 1886

This Italianate style Victorian mansion originally also had iron cresting on the roof, and the long thin windows had shutters.  Sullivan owned a grocery store in Ashburnham, and under his sons this business eventually became Sullivan's Pharmacy.  The house was sold to the Catholic Diocese of Peterborough during the Depression.  During the 1940s and 1950s, the house was a convent for nuns who made communion wafers.

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