Dorchester Illustration no. 2358 Fowler Clark Epstein Farm
Fowler Clark Epstein Farm, 487 Norfolk Street, Mattapan
Tomorrow evening, June 25, 2018, from 5 to 8 pm, Historic Boston Inc., North Bennett Street School, The Trust for Public Land, and the urban Farming Institute of Boston open the newly-restored Fowler Clark Epstein Farm. The $3.6 million renewal of the farm creates a new headquarters for the Urban Farming Institute of Boston and supports farmer training, public education programs, a farmers market and demonstration kitchen.
The property has had only five owners over 240 years. The house’s first owner and presumably its builder was Samuel Fowler who farmed 11 acres in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1895, the property was subdivided into house lots, leaving the mansion house and barn on the smaller home lot of a little over half an acre.
The property was designated a Boston Landmark in 2005. The Boston Landmarks Commission Landmark Designation calls the property “a rare remaining, highly intact agricultural setting the typified the vernacular landscape of pre-Civil War Boston.” The designation also says, “The Fowler-Clark farmhouse is one of just four farmhouses that date to between 1786 and 1806 identified in Boston, and may be the oldest of the four.”