Piety Corner Historic District

Piety Corner is a cluster of houses and a few institutional buildings around Lexington and Bacon streets in Waltham, Massachusetts. The district covers about 65.6 acres and includes 48 resources, 33 of them contributing. Its buildings date from about 1819 to the 1910s and show Federal, Italianate, Mansard, Carpenter Gothic, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles. Settlement began in the late seventeenth century, and the name refers to the church deacons who lived nearby in the eighteenth century. After about 1820 a Swedenborgian congregation took root here, building a chapel and a school whose 1864 mansard-roofed buildings appear to be the first of that style in Waltham. Later, large Colonial Revival houses were built for well-to-do families. Boundaries were drawn to exclude newer buildings, leaving what the nomination describes as the largest grouping of well-preserved historic buildings in the city. The area remains residential, though Totten Pond Road, built in 1960, carries heavy traffic.