Mount Pleasant House (No. 264)
264 Bradford Street. [2008, Dunlap]
[2010, Dunlap]
[2011, Dunlap]
[Map by Dunlap]
Text last updated in 2015 | With its deep, picturesque, wrap-around porch — here attracting the attention of a plein-air painter — Mount Pleasant House is immediately recognizable as the Victorian-era guest house it once was. It sits on one of the largest undivided lots in town, which has been owned for many years by Arnold and Ruth Dwyer and their family. It runs one-fifth of a mile to Route 6 and 80 yards along Bradford, all the way down to No. 270A. Mount Pleasant was built around 1890, not long after the Old Colony Railroad opened up the town to tourism. It was run by Mary Days at the turn of the century. John Francis, of Francis’s Flats at 577 Commercial, owned the land. Ross Moffett and Bruce McKain had studios on this property as, more recently, did Rick Fleury, whose landscape paintings include a Dialogue series inspired by the works by Mark Rothko, who lived nearby.
Polly Burnell wrote on 23 June 2014: Arnold [Dwyer] owned the big strip of land all the way back to the highway, and decided to make a big housing development back there. He was such an enterprising old Yankee-Irishman! The opposition to the project was Huge, as you can imagine — it’s a wetland back there for one thing. He was disappointed, and never understood why anyone would want to preserve that “useless” land. He and his wife were my landlords and lovely people, last of a breed.
¶ Republished on 18 October 2023.
264 Bradford Street on the Town Map, showing property lines.