Lost Melrose, Volume Five

Back in February, we posted about the plaque in Pine Banks Park that honors the Ensign Thomas Lynde house, which was almost certainly built with enslaved labor. But whatever became of the house? That is the subject of this week’s installment of Lost Melrose.

The plaque was first installed in 1930 as part of the Massachusetts Tercentenary program. At that time, the house was very much in existence, near the northwest corner of Main Street and Banks Place, somewhere in what is today the parking lot of Hunt's Photo and Video. Famed as the oldest house in Melrose, it was the only building in the city honored with such a plaque. Ten years later, in 1940, the Historic American Buildings Survey took the first two photos of the house that you see here.

The third photo was taken by a member of the Melrose Camera Club in 1956, and it was a bit of a requiem, since the house was about to be demolished. In that photo, you can see that the vegetation surrounding the property was spiraling out of control, and apparently things were much the same way on the inside. The house was condemned, the final result of a sad state of affairs that historic preservationists call “demolition by neglect.” Because the building died in that way, there was no hue and cry upon its demise. It had been on life support for a long time.

Following demolition, the plaque was unceremoniously chucked into a dump, where it was later recovered by a scavenger. One day, the scavenger knocked on the door of Suzanne Lynde of Woodland Road, the only person with the Lynde surname then living in Melrose, to ask if she wanted it. She accepted the donation, and the 200 pound plaque lay face down in her backyard for years. In 1994, Lynde attended a lecture on Thomas Lynde given by Anthony Pagano at the Melrose Public Library. Following his presentation, Lynde asked Pagano if he wanted the sign. Pagano then paid to have the plaque cleaned and arranged with the city of Melrose to mount the plaque in its current location.

And that is the strange tale of why the largest and heaviest historical marker in the city describes a building that no longer exists at a location where it never existed.