The Leighton Homestead

Historical perspective

The land upon which the Leighton homestead sits first appeared in private ownership on Newton maps in 1874. The owner was Capt. Charles Everett Ranlett (1817-1916) (photo on right) of Montville, ME, who moved to Newton in the late 1860s, served as a city selectman in 1871-72, and as a representative in the Massachusetts legislature in 1877-79. He was a member of the Auburndale Congregational Church and the New England Historical and Genealogical Society. He married Elizabeth Bond Stearns and later Ann Maria Jordan and had four children: Elizabeth Frances, Charles Oliver, Susan Alice and Frederick Jordan. (Newton, the Garden City 1874-1902)

The Ranletts owned the land between Williston Road (Auburn Place until 1908) and Central Street and had a Central Street address. Carriage paths connected Auburn and Central throughout the estate. The hill toward Central was known as Ranlett Hill.

The Ranlett heirs subdivided the land in 1886, and Edward E. Hardy (1850-1903), an insurance broker, acquired the area between Auburn and Central. Hardy was born in Dorchester and studied at universities in Stuttgart and Karlstadt, Germany, and Amherst College. He was president of the Newton Boat Club, a member of the Auburndale Improvement Association, a trustee of the Newton Hospital, a member of the Auburndale Congregational Church and a member of the Newton School Board in 1897-1903. He was married to Elizabeth B. and had two children, Charles A. and Mrs. Thomas Nickerson. He was buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery. (The Newton Graphic,10/16/1903)

After Hardy’s death, the land passed on to his widow and eventually to his son, Charles A. Hardy, Esq., who continued to subdivide it. According to Newton city records, in the summer of 1912, Charles A. Hardy began building the current house on lot 5, which contained 5,700 sq. ft. of land and sat at the corner of Williston Road and the new Maple Road that connected Williston and Central. Its address was 23 Williston Road.

The house was a 3-story, 2,000 square-foot, Craftsman-style Colonial featuring a screened front porch with shingled columns and a steeply pitched side gabled roof with projecting rafters. A garage was added in 1925.

On July 18, 1913, Hardy and his wife Alice E., who by then were residing in Wayland, sold the house to Ella M. Robinson for “one dollar and other valuable considerations,” according to the deed.  Robinson, who was a budding painter,  was a second and third grade teacher at C. C. Burr and Williams schools. She lived in the house with her mother Lois and Ruth L. Woodbury, a music and kindergarten teacher at Burr.

The Leightons

On May 28, 1918, Robinson sold the house to William A. Leighton, her principal, for $2,000, and moved to Chicago. Leighton (1883-1950) was born in Lawrence, MA, where he finished high school. His family then moved to Colorado  and he graduated from Colorado College in 1904. He taught classics at a private school in Hartford, CT, the Waban School for Boys, the New England College of Languages, and in N. Attleboro and Fitchburg high schools. He was principal of the Hamilton School in Newton Lower Falls before he was named principal of Auburndale’s Burr, Willams and Hamilton school district in 1918.

Mr. Leighton married Clara L. Lincoln, another teacher, and they had three children: William Jr., Ruth and Jane (The Newton Graphic, 8/24/1950).  Ruth became a teacher, while Jane and William Jr. were involved in business.

Mr. Leighton’s 34-year tenure as a principal was legendary and was capped by his campaign to build a new Williams School. On May 22, 1951,  a year after his death, the Newton Teachers Federation named the Williams School auditorium after him. The plaque commemorating that day still hangs at Williams School.

The ceremony’s program praised Leighton, the “dean” of Newton’s principals, for his “wisdom and patient understanding—his kind heart and ready smile—his dignity and quiet sense of humor—his never-failing interest in his children and their parents.” “No undertaking of a community nature could have been supported with more genuine spirit of unanimity,” the program said, “than the dedication of this auditorium to the memory of a man who during his thirty-four years in Auburndale as principal of the Burr-Williams Schools gave himself to the welfare of the children of this community.”

At the same time, the city board of aldermen, under the leadership of neighbors aldermen Bigelow and Sutherland, changed the name of Maple Street to Leighton Road and gave the Leighton family house Number 1, the address it has today.

In 1960, Mrs. Leighton sold the house to her daughter Jane and her husband Robert B. Carr. Mr. Carr, an Air Force lieutenant,  was a University of Chicago meteorology graduate and was used in weather forecasting for military pursposes, including the setting of D-Day. He later became a mathematics teacher at Day Jr. High School. The Carrs had four children: Bernard, Robert Jr., Stephen and Eloise. Mr. Carr is remembered by neighbors for his continually being on a ladder repairing the house.

In August 1989, a year after her husband’s death, Jane Carr sold the Leighton homestead to the current owners, Janet and Manny Paraschos, who moved here from Arkansas. Manny is a professor of mass communication/journalism at Emerson College and Janet is a  writer/editor. They have two children, Sophia and Alexander.

Life in the Leighton homestead
The youngest of the Leighton children, Jane, recalls (see "Relevant documents" section) a wonderful childhood in the Leighton home. Much of the time the house was full of relatives, including both grandmothers and an aunt. Jane and her sister slept in the second floor sleeping porch and kept warm via “warming pans, woolen bonnets, and rubber ponchos” to keep the snow drifts off.  They were awakened by “Mrs. Miller’s roosters,” Mrs. Carr says. The children took the train from the Auburndale Station to Newton High School. In the living room, Mr. Leighton had a player piano and a large “superheterodyne” RCA radiophone  through which he listened to Saturday afternoon opera and Sunday night symphony. “Father knew every word and note of both,” Mrs. Carr recalls. He enjoyed taking the children by train (he never learned to drive) to Faneuil Hall on Saturdays to shop for meat, his daughter says.  

In the early days, part of the current living room was the dining room and the kitchen was in the current dining room. The current kitchen used to be a porch and then a kitchen with a “refrigerator room” and a pantry where aluminum pots and pans also were kept. Mrs. Carr recalls that a bolt of lighting in the ‘40s “entered through the back door bell” and damaged several of the pots and pans kept in the area. When the Paraschos bought the house, they remodeled the pantry/kitchen to create an eat-in kitchen.

The mostly unfinished attic used to be Miss Robinson’s studio and had a skylight through which the Leighton children watched the stars and hoped for a glimpse of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. “Imagination played a big part in our existence,” Mrs. Carr says. Mrs. Leighton removed the skylights when they started to leak. In 1997 the Paraschos turned the attic into a master bedroom suite complete with two skylights. Originally the attic had two oil  stoves to warm some of the children who slept, practiced their music or played there. Early in its life the house had coal heat and gas lights and there are remnants of these utilities still around the house.

Because of the peculiarities of early land subdivision, the triangular land northeast of the house belongs to the city. The Leightons, Carrs and Paraschos offered to buy the triangle but the city refused. However, it was always understood, Mrs. Carr recalls, that the land was to be maintained by those residing at 1 Leighton Road, something all three families have done.