Harvard Street is one of the oldest streets in Brookline, having been known as “the road to the colleges” in the seventeenth century. North Brookline remained largely undeveloped until the late nineteenth century, and the Edward Devotion House represents an eighteenth-century survivor in a densely built-up urban neighborhood. Indeed, recent investigations have determined that the frame of an earlier seventeenth-century house forms the core of the present two-story frame structure with pedimented doorway on the right-hand end bay. Saved by the town in 1891, the house is administered by the Brookline Historical Society and is open to the public as a house museum with Georgian rooms. Although no outbuildings survive, the location of this house, framed by the Devotion School on a lot set well back from the street, suggests a sense of the open space that characterized the town's early history as a farming community.