Palmer-Lewis Estate

Set on both sides of Black Brook Road in semi-rural Bedford, this 31-acre estate combines a country house with the core of a working family farm. The main house dates to about 1779 and retains heavy timber framing, fieldstone foundations and wide-board floors from that period. About 1860, Francis Palmer, who had risen from stage driver to omnibus owner, then president of the National Broadway Bank and New York City chamberlain, enlarged and redesigned it as an Italianate summer residence with a bracketed porch on three sides. Around the house are fifteen mostly frame outbuildings, including a carriage house, residences, sheds, well houses and a barn complex arranged as a quadrangle. Stone walls enclose small fields that show how intensively the land was farmed, along with remains of an orchard and a vegetable garden. Much of the original acreage has been subdivided, so this core is the last evidence of the Palmer and Lewis families' long presence in Bedford.