The Baroness Riedesel, in her lively letters, rehearses the situation as it existed just before she and her husband were quartered in Cambridge: “Seven families, who were connected with each other, partly by the ties of relationship and partly by affection, had here farms, gardens, and magnificent houses, and not far off plantations of fruit. The owners of these were in the habit of daily meeting each other in the afternoon, now at the house of one, and now at another, and making themselves merry with music and the dance--living in prosperity, united and happy, until, alas! this ruinous war severed them, and left all their houses desolate, except two, the proprietors of which were also soon obliged to flee.” Beyond the Lechmere-Sewall estate was that of Judge Joseph Lee, where in Lowell’s middle day lived his friend and “corrector of the press” George Nichols, and then, just before the road made another bend, came the Fayerweather house, occupied in Lowell’s youth by William Wells, the schoolmaster. Here the road turned-to the south, and passed the last of the Row, known in later years as Elmwood. The house, square in form, was built in 1767 on the simple model which translated the English brick manor house of the Georgian period into the terms of New England wood; it was well proportioned, roomy, with a hall dividing it midway; and such features as abundant use of wood in the interior finish, and quaintly twisted banisters to its staircase, preserve the style of the best of domestic colonial buildings. Heavy oaken beams give the structure solidity and the spaces between them in the four outer walls are filled in with brick, while great chimneys are the poles which fasten to the earth the tent which seems likely still to shelter many generations.