Landscape Information
Located approximately two-and-a-half miles east of downtown, this relatively level five-acre site is nestled between Chester and Euclid Avenues. The southern edge of the property features a Colonial farmhouse, established in 1824 by settlers Rufus and Jane Pratt Dunham as a home, stagecoach stop, and tavern. The property was sold in 1853 and served solely as a residence until 1930. In 1936 local landscape architect Donald Gray organized the corporation Dunham Tavern, Inc., to acquire and rehabilitate the structure and property, which opened as a house museum in 1982.
Accessed from Euclid Avenue from the south, a drive skirts the east façade of the L-shaped farmhouse and a formal garden, named in Gray’s honor. The drive leads to a parking area framed to the east by a garden, established in 1991, which includes a central brick path and beds planted with flowering shrubs and perennials. The north side of the property features a barn (1999), a smaller replica of an 1840 structure that burned in 1963. Demonstration gardens abut the barn, extending north and terminating at a border of deciduous trees, including sycamore and locusts, that screen the property from Chester Avenue. The easternmost portion of the property includes an orchard facing Euclid Avenue and a lawn with a looped path that leads visitors south towards Euclid Avenue through a grove of deciduous trees, including oak.
In 2019 LAND Studio conducted community engagement studies that informed a master plan prepared by Merritt Chase in 2021. Dunham Tavern was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
