Spring Hill Historic District

Spring Hill is a residential neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts, covering about 12 acres on a hill that looks south toward Cambridge. In 1843 real estate dealer George Brastow hired Alexander Wadsworth to lay out a grid of building lots around Harvard Street, and horsecar and rail service made the slope attractive to Boston and Charlestown businessmen. Eight double Greek Revival houses went up around 1845 to 1848, followed by villas, Gothic Revival cottages and the circular Round House built in 1856 by inventor Enoch Robinson. Late nineteenth-century Queen Anne and Shingle Style houses followed, including the 1895 Edward Crane House by George A. Loring. Around the turn of the century, large estates were subdivided and three-deckers and apartment buildings filled in. The district holds 69 properties, most of them contributing, and keeps its original street plan. It was listed as Somerville's largest and most intact pre-Civil War residential district.