Kassar House

Kassar House at 151 Thayer Street, now occupied by the Department of Mathematics, was formerly used by the Computer Sciences Department. The three-story house was built in 1884 by Nancy Bishop, sister-in-law of the wife of General Ambrose Burnside. Mrs. Bishop died two years later and left the house to her daughter. It was bought in 1920 by Frank Hinckley and in 1930 by William Viall. Brown acquired the building in 1977 from Richmond Viall, and named it Edward W. Kassar House in recognition of funds given in 1982 by Raymond E. Kassar ’48. The Gould Laboratory, a brick addition to Kassar House was built in 1982 to provide a much needed computer science laboratory including the Foxboro Auditorium with tiers of worktables and computers for classroom instruction in computer science. The laboratory was named for Gould Inc., an Illinois-based electronics company whose Gould Inc. Foundation contributed $500,000 toward construction costs. The auditorium was named for the Foxboro Company of Foxboro, Massachusetts, specialist in process control systems, which contributed another $150,000. In 1990 the two existing sections were integrated into a new Mathematics Building designed by William Kite Architects, and Gould Laboratory, no longer a laboratory, became Gould Annex.