This white Queen Anne Victorian house in Colrain Center, once the home of Dr. John Cram, was built in 1896 to replace the house he had bought in 1889 from the previous doctor, which burned when lightning struck an adjacent barn in 1895. Cram established a hospital in the house, which also held a “free public library.” His wife, Colrain historian Katherine Cram, was nurse and librarian.
Dr. John Olson set up a practice in the house in 1937, after Cram had died, and later enclosed the front porch in order to remove the waiting room from the front hall. An inventive tinkerer, Doc devised a “tonsil chair” adapting a kitchen chair for use instead of an examining table when removing tonsils from a patient in his office, after which he carried the patient over his shoulder up the steep back stairs to the “tonsil room.”
Tearing through the woods for home visits in his iconic Jeep, he was for 42 years the last of Colrain’s country doctors.
In this undated photo above, the trolley tracks are faintly visible in the foreground, and the trolley car barn can be seen at the end of the street. The Shelburne Falls and Colrain Electric Road ceased operation in 1927.
[Source of article and house photo: Colrain Clarion February 2026 issue.]
Clipping from the Vermont Phoenix
describing the fire in 1895
Clipping from the Greenfield Gazette and Courier
describing the fire in 1895
Advertisement in the North Adams Transcript
announcing the opening of Dr. John H. Olson’s
office in Colrain, Mass.
Clipping from the North Adam’s Transcript
with information about the opening
of Dr. John H. Olson’s office
Clipping from the Greenfield Recorder
in August, 2017 regarding
Dr. John H. Olson and his Jeep
