The Hooper Mansion was built in 1889 in Boston’s Bay Back neighborhood, across the Charles River from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The mansion’s first inhabitants, the Hoopers, had a dog that is cited as the originator of the Boston terrier breed.
The reclaimed wood joists will be milled at Longleaf Lumber’s Berwick, Maine, facility into flooring, as well as paneling, tables and countertops.
The mansion saw many owners and even one murder. After the Hooper family, the mansion went to an eccentric widow, Mabel Slater, who developed an ice-cooled refrigerator and a sleeping bag worn the doubled as a garment for soldiers in World War I. Slater was in the habit of leaving a rear door open for the poor to enter her kitchen seeking food. In 1917, one person also sought to kill Slater. The butler stopped the intruder but lost his life in the process.
The mansion has been a dining club, a secretarial school and, until its sale in 2013 to a luxury condominium developer, served as a regional base for the Church of Scientology.
While the reclaimed wood did suffer water damage from its 126-year stint in the mansion, Longleaf Lumber says a good portion of the material will be recyclable after kiln drying.
