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In the Roxbury neighbourhood of Boston about three miles south of downtown, the Shirley-Eustis House is one of the most architecturally distinguished surviving colonial-era country estates in the United States and the only remaining country house built by a Royal Colonial Governor still standing in North America. The dramatic Georgian-style mansion was built between 1747 and 1751 as the country estate of William Shirley, the Massachusetts Bay Colony's most prominent eighteenth-century Royal Governor (serving from 1741 through 1757), at the height of Shirley's political prominence following the celebrated 1745 colonial victory over the French fortress at Louisbourg in Nova Scotia. The house was designed in the celebrated formal English Palladian style then fashionable at the highest levels of British colonial society, with elaborate brick-and-stone exterior detailing, generously proportioned principal rooms, an unusually grand central staircase and an elaborately carved central pediment over the principal entrance. The house was originally set on a substantial 33-acre estate that included extensive formal gardens, a deer park, several outbuildings and a working farm, with sweeping views east toward Boston Harbor and west across the colonial-era Roxbury countryside. Governor Shirley occupied the house for some 16 years before returning permanently to England in 1769. The house passed through a succession of subsequent owners during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most notably the celebrated William Eustis (a Massachusetts physician, Revolutionary War surgeon, United States Secretary of War under Presidents Madison and Monroe, and Governor of Massachusetts from 1823 through his 1825 death in office), who acquired the house in 1819 and lived there during his Governor tenure. The surrounding 33-acre estate was gradually subdivided through the nineteenth century as Roxbury was annexed to the City of Boston in 1868 and the surrounding countryside was rapidly urbanised. By the early twentieth century the house itself was structurally deteriorating and the surrounding neighbourhood was dominated by densely built nineteenth-century row housing. The house was acquired in 1913 by the Shirley-Eustis Association (a small group of preservation-minded Bostonians) and meticulously restored between 1976 and 1985 under the guidance of the celebrated Boston preservation architect Charles Briggs. The house operates as a small house museum open by guided tour during the warmer months (Thursdays through Saturdays, June through October), with the surrounding two-acre garden providing one of the most peaceful small green spaces in the otherwise densely built Roxbury neighbourhood.