[2] The Colonial Revival house was built in 1893 for Cummings' parents, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.

[1] The Cummings house is set on a roughly triangular parcel formed by the junction of Irving and Scott Streets in the Shady Hill neighborhood east of Harvard University.

It has a projecting dentillated cornice below the gabled roof, and a porch supported by Tuscan columns.

[3] The house was designed by Walker and Kimball for Edward E. Cummings, a professor at Harvard and a local pastor, and was built in 1893.

Cummings described the house in his six nonlectures: "My own home faced the Cambridge world as a finely and solidly constructed mansion, preceded by a large oval lawn and ringed with an imposing white-pine hedge," and "The big Cambridge house was in this respect, as in all other respects, a true home.