The Gray House was designed in 1810 by architect Ithiel Town, whose earliest known work it is. It was built for the zoologist William Dandridge Peck, and originally stood at the corner of Garden and Linnaean Streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the grounds of the Harvard College Botanical Garden. Subsequent occupants included botanist Thomas Nuttall and Harvard presidents James Walker and Jared Sparks. Asa Gray purchased the house in 1842 and moved in during the summer of 1844, after receiving an appointment to a professorship at Harvard that he would hold for 45 years. Already a rising star in the world of botany, Gray in 1848 published The General of the Plants of the United States, which was not only groundbreaking for the content, but also in its presentation. His discovery of relationships between plants of North America and East Asia was influential in the growth of the field of plant geography. His highly public defense of Charles Darwin'sOn the Origin of Species gained him widespread attention in the public sphere. The Gray House was purchased in 1910 by Allen Cox, who moved it to its present address the same year. It is a private residence, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1965.
Architecture
The house has a rectangular main block, measuring, with a side ell that is about square. When first built, it was attached to a plant conservatory that was also designed by Town. The house is two stories tall and five bays wide, with a hip roof surrounded by a low balustrade. The main facade is flushboarded, with pilasters at the corners; the other sides of the house are sheathed in clapboards. The cornice on the main block is dentillated; that on the ell is plain. The main entrance is centered on the front facade, with sidelight windows on either side and a fanlight window above. The entry is sheltered by a portico supported by clustered square columns; this portico is a replacement to the original, made when the house was moved. There is a secondary entrance in the ell, which is sheltered by a closed-in porch dating to c. 1920. At the rear of the house is an addition, roughly dating to the move but extended later, which incorporates a formerly-external shed into the house. The interior of the house follows a typical Federal-period center hall plan, with the central hall divided into front and rear sections by a doorway with a fanlight. There are two rooms on either side of the central hall. The woodwork in the public spaces is not particularly elaborate, with simple cornice moldings and fireplace surrounds, and flared moldings around the windows. The downstairs room of the ell served as Asa Gray's study, and includes a number of wood-frame display cases lining one wall.
