Dorchester Illustration no. 2392 135 Savin Hill Avenue
Today’s illustration is a scan of a real photo post card circa 1910 showing the house at 135 Savin Hill Avenue, corner of Hubbardston Road, along with a picture from Google showing its more recent appearance.
The building permit , dated January 4, 1900, identifies the owner as Louise Donkin and one of the architects as her husband. Louise acquired the land following the sub-division of the F.C. Welch estate. Roads were put through, and in the 1904 & 1910 atlases, Donkin Terrace was the name of what is now Hubbardston Road. The first owner after construction was Mary A. Bertram of whom little is known, though her will on Ancestry mentions several pieces of property along Savin Hill Avenue and another on Dakota Street.
The house has retained its massing, but there are some little changes in the appearance. The vintage photograph shows how much shutters can dress up a house and shows the original design of the porch, where the elements exhibit a little more style than the porch in the more recent porch in the Google picture. In the vintage photo there is a little railing in front of the attic dormer on the side of the house.
During the early 1950s, the Southeast Expressway was constructed on the west side of Savin Hill.
Although Savin Hill had been separated from the rest of Dorchester by the Old Colony Railroad tracks since 1844, the expressway served to make this isolation even more pronounced. As part of the Expressway project, a street and houses on the west side of Hubbardston Road were taken out and a concrete retaining wall was constructed. This opened up a view of Dorchester over the Expressway and the railroad tracks for the houses along the east side of Hubbardston Road.