The Dana Palmer house ain't where it used to be. Four years ago the yellow clapboard building stood right in the middle of what is now Lamont. By the spring of 1947 it had been uprooted and towed across Quiney Street to its present spot between the Union and the Faculty Club, missing only a wing which stayed behind to become headquarters for the Fuller Construction Company. A year later, the house opened as a guest house for distinguished visitors to the University.
The Dana Palmer house was built in 1823. It got the first part of its name from the builders, the Dana family, who lived there for ten years. Richard Henry Dana, the author of "Two Years before the Mast," grew up in the house; his chum James Russell Lowell once tried to ride a pony up the front stairs.
In 1840, since it stood on the only hill in the Yard, the building was picked to be the University's first observatory. A skeptical classics professor reported to a friend that "there is a caboose set upon the roof with a telescope that commands an unobstructed view of all the chambers in the neighborhood." Not all the views were unobstructed, however. A local farmer moved a barn onto his place just south of Massachusetts Avenue, neatly eclipsing the top of Blue Hill, which the observatory was using for a transit sight. The University finally had to buy a right of way in the roof and chop a hole through it to maintain the sight.
After the observatory moved to better quarters, the house served as residence for a series of professors. One of the first was a minister named Huntington who outraged Unitarian Cambridge by turning Episcopalian. He finally resigned his post and went out west to be the bishop of Central New York. William James moved in 1880, but only for two years.
The longest-term resident was Professor George Herbert Palmer, whence the second half of the building's name. Palmer, a well-known classical scholar who claimed genially that he "existed on the decay of Greece," lived there from 1894 until 1933. On his initiative, the astronomer's "caboose" was finally taken off the roof and some of the interior remodelled. Dean Gummere used the building for a few years before the war, and after Pearl Harbor, when the Navy moved into President Conant's house, President Conant moved into the Dana Palmer house. He moved out just before it migrated across Quincy Street.
Before the building was opened as a guest house, it was remodelled extensively inside with period furnishings to match, some of them given or lent by graduates, others on loan from the Fogg or the Metropolitan in New York. The star visitors so far have been ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia, who stayed there when he came to speak at the Business School last spring, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was in Cambridge for a short time this summer. President Conant also stays there occasionally in one room he particularly likes-because it has a shower instead of a bath.
