 The Downes family, founders of Downes Lumber of Boston, used it as a family home for the next two decades.Their decision to sell the house and surrounding land to the Religious of Christian Education, an order of nuns, was significant in the ongoing preservation of the house during the years after World War II when so many large homes of the Victorian and Edwardian period were destroyed.The nuns built a grade school, the Marycliff Academy, on what had been the western paddock and used the house as their residence.