By Peter F. Stevens

It was not just a house with a history, but a house where history-makers came knocking &emdash; literally. From its perch atop a rocky ledge at the corner of Dudley and Howard streets, the Swan House opened its elegant front doors to the "A-List" of New England and French society from 1796 to the mid-1820s. John Hancock, Henry Knox, the Marquis de Lafayette, and many more luminaries of the day came to visit the mansion that Charles Bulfinch designed for James and Hepzibah Clarke Swan.

In the annals of Dorchester, James Swan stands out as one of the most intriguing and enigmatic characters of his era. Swan, born in Fifeshire, Scotland, emigrated to Boston as a youth and eventually became a clerk in the 1770s, when the region simmered with unrest against the British Crown.

As an 18 year-old, Swan embraced the idea of rebellion against Britain and espoused the cause of human rights. On March 13, 1772, the Boston Gazette ran "the following proposal for printing [of a book]:

"A dissuasive to Great Britain and her colonies from the slave trade to Africa, by James Swan, a friend to the welfare of the continent. To be published by subscription..."

Opposed to slavery, immersed in the Patriots' cause, Swan greased up his face and dressed like an Indian in December 1773 and stormed aboard a British merchant ship in Boston Harbor to take part in the Tea Party. At the Battle of Bunker Hill, in June 1775, he served as an aide to Rebel hero Dr. Joseph Warren and was wounded by the redcoats.

Commanding an artillery company in George Washington's Continental Army, Swan helped haul cannon atop Dorchester Heights in March 1776 and drive the British troops and fleet from Boston for good. Swan was appointed Secretary to the Board of War of Massachusetts in 1777 and was later the state's Adjutant General.

After the Revolution, Swan went into a range of business ventures &emdash; and into deep debt as each venture floundered and failed. He sought a means to reverse his bad luck and found it in Revolutionary Paris, armed with letters of introduction from such wartime friends as the Marquis de Lafayette.

William Dana Orcutt writes, "His [Swan's] energy and abilities soon made him popular [in France], and he gained a great reputation as well as a substantial fortune." He paid off all of his debts by 1794, returned to Boston about that same time, married the pretty and polished Hepzibah Clarke, and decided to build a mansion on a piece of Dorchester property he had purchased in 1780 for the pricey sum of 18,000 pounds.

Swan's land was the former estate of Nathaniel Hatch, a Tory who had fled with the British troops and fleet in 1776. On an outcrop of rock jutting above the corner of Dudley and Howard Streets, Charles Bulfinch designed a French-influenced home for the Swans. James Swan, in a letter to John Hancock, wrote: "I have built an elegant and very expensive house upon it, including in one a road-house, two stables, and a hay-loft, with a servant's chamber and a pigeon-house."

Locals dubbed the mansion "the Round House." Mrs. William H. Cilley writes, "...some one once suggested that Captain Swan must have had a steamboat in mind when it was fashioned."

At their mansion, with its gracefully curved and pillared porch and its elegant trappings inside, the Swans became the first couple of Dorchester society, entertaining a who's who of movers and shakers from both sides of the Atlantic. Mrs. Swan received Lafayette as her guest of honor during his triumphant 1825 tour of America on the 50th anniversary of the American Revolution. Records of Lafayette's visit to the Dorchester manse state that "she [Mrs. Swan] received the famous Frenchman standing on the steps at the end of the piazza at the main entrance of the house, which she rarely allowed to be used....[she was] dressed in a black silk gown and wearing a turban of black lace....Madam Swan is reputed, in spite of her strange eccentricities, to have been very beautiful." The historian did not elaborate as to what Mrs. Swan's "eccentricities" were.

Throughout Dorchester and Boston, people talked not only about the luminaries who rode up the ledge to the Swan House, but also to the home's so-called "Marie Antoinette Room," whose dazzling decor was steeped in mystery. Orcutt notes: "The story goes that Madam Swan, during her residence in Paris, purchased from the sacked palaces the draperies from the Tuileries and furniture which had belonged to the deposed nobility of the French capital. It is also rumored that the wonderful gobelin hangings that adorned this room, and the quaint old plate, had a very different history, to the effect that Colonel Swan had been concerned in a plot to rescue Marie Antoinette, and to bring her to America, where she might be harbored."

No one knew how the alleged plot had failed, but everyone in town did know that James Swan had shipped a treasure trove of French furniture, drapes, paintings, plates, and other items from France to Dorchester. In Dorchester, residents joked, "...between Madame Guillotine, who took off their heads, and Swan, who took off their trunks, little was left of those unfortunate Frenchman."

Swan himself met an unfortunate and grueling end in France. Refusing to pay a claim against him by a German businessman, the Dorchester magnate was imprisoned. Although he could easily have afforded to pay the man and leave the cell at any time, Swan refused to back down because "he considered the claim unjust, and preferred to suffer imprisonment rather than yield his principle."

Described as a "fine-looking old gentleman" who resembled Benjamin Franklin, Swan spent 22 years in his "modestly furnished" cell, where Lafayette visited him often. Swan was released during the revolution of 1830 and was greeted by his staunch friend Lafayette. The American would never see his mansion on the corner of Dudley and Howard again, for he died the morning after he was freed.

Mrs. Swan lived out the rest of her years in the Dorchester estate. Following her death in the 1850s, the house saw a number of new owners. In the 1880s, the wreckers' hammers took down "the Round House," and only a few photos and a few legends left to to testify to splendor that had once symbolized the ledge-top mansion.