Tavern Acres Historic District

Tavern Acres is a planned neighborhood in northwest North Andover, Massachusetts, organized around the 1907 Stevens Memorial Library and a two-and-three-quarter-acre Memorial Park. The Stevens family, owners of local woolen mills, inherited land once known as the Tavern Lot and in 1920 began developing it with a park as the focus. The Olmsted Brothers prepared the plan. Twenty dwellings went up between 1920 and 1924, along with garages, in Colonial Revival, Dutch Colonial and Craftsman styles. Several houses follow plans by the Boston firm E.M. Parsons, and some are mirror-image pairs. Lots, setbacks and building scale are consistent, producing a unified suburban streetscape with mature trees. The library, designed by Guy Lowell in an Italian Renaissance manner with red brick and a terra cotta roof, anchors the northern end. Opposite it, the park holds the Patriots Monument of 1922. The district counts thirty-five contributing buildings, plus the park and monument.