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HomeMy Public PortalAboutCrosbyLane_163Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.4/11 FORM B  BUILDING MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Photograph View from east. Locus Map (north at top) Source: Mass GIS Oliver Parcel Viewer. Recorded by: Kathryn Grover & Neil Larson Organization: Brewster Historical Commission Date (month / year): June 2018 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 115-6 Harwich BRE.152 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): East Brewster Address:163 - 179 Crosby Lane Historic Name: Crosby Mansion Albert and Matilda Crosby House Nathan Crosby Homestead Uses:Present: historic house museum Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1835, 1888-89 Source:deeds, historic atlases, historic newspapers Style/Form: Colonial Revival Architect/Builder: Roach and Tilden, architect Exterior Material: Foundation: brick Wall/Trim: wood shingles Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: Cottage, shed Major Alterations (with dates): Function room & rest rooms added north end, late 20th century Condition:excellent Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:4.77 + 14.20 = 18.97 acres Setting: The house is situated in a dense residential area characterized by summer cottages and retirement homes built in the mid-20th century. It borders on Cape Cod Bay. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.152 Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form. ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION: The Crosby Mansion is a large, rambling two-story wood frame country house designed by the Boston architectural firm Rotch & Tilden and built in 1888-89. It was constructed around the Nathan Crosby Homestead, a story-and-a-half, center-chimney house estimated to have been built in 1835. The old house is a very late example of this traditional New England house type, which originated in the 17th century and represents the iconographic Cape Cod house. The center-chimney plan has two principal rooms in the front, on either side of the chimney and an entrance lobby, and a kitchen centered behind. The front façade is symmetrically organized with a center entrance flanked by two windows. This late iteration is distinguished by an upper-story kneewall, expanding space under the gable roof, and a trabeated doorway with transom in the Greek Revival manner. Wide corner boards and a frieze board along the eave are additional indicators of the style and construction era. Bed chambers are centered on the ridgeline in the upper story with two windows centered on the end walls; smaller windows are contained in rooms partitioned under the eaves. The exposed west end also contains one window in the front room and a door in the rear leading to anterooms in the kitchen area. In the interest of preserving his birthplace, Albert Crosby incorporated this relic in the country house he built on his ancestral lands. Other than covering the exterior of the new house with wood shingles and building massive brick chimneys, little of the Cape Cod tradition is expressed in its architecture. Period accounts of the building associate its design and taste to other far-flung models the owners were familiar with in Chicago and New York, and their Boston architects, both partners having studied at the Ecole das Beaux-Arts in Paris, brought their own modern sensibilities to the design. The two-story house has twin pavilions connected by a recessed central connector containing the entrance hall. The fronts of the pavilions have different facades providing a picturesque asymmetry to the principal façade. The southern wing is Classical in design with a pedimented gable, corner pilasters with Roman capitals and a tall frieze with a dentil band. Fenestration is regular with three windows on the first story and two on the second; however, one of the upper windows is contained in a projecting box bay covering two-thirds of the wall, subtly upsetting the symmetry. The northern wing has a hipped roof with a dormer surmounted by a large scrolled pediment and paired windows in the first and second stories. Each level gains elaboration moving upward. The entrance is off-center in the central section and flanked by windows of unequal size. An arcaded veranda spans the entire front supported by numerous, slender columns; a rounded atrium fills the void in front of the recessed center section. A view of the house published in Deyo’s 1890 History of Barnstable County, pictures a hexagonal lighthouse tower emerging from the roof of the southerly pavilion; this feature no longer exists. A long wing extends back from the north pavilion with a complex two-story façade containing a second-story oriel near the front and behind which an engaged three-story tower provides an outlook facing Cape Cod Bay fronted by a Palladian screen. Three low dormers in the roof indicate the location of servants’ quarters. In the late 20th century, when the house came into public use, a one-story, gable-roof wing containing a function room was constructed on this side obscuring much of the first story of the house. A one-story bathroom facility was added to the rear of this wing later. On the south end, a one-story, hipped-roof wing with a polygonal front once connected to a large art gallery that period accounts describe with brick walls and a metal roof (see historic view below). This portion of the house has been demolished. The rear of the house is an erratic assemblage of wings, projections and dormers, the old family house included. The house is situated amid broad lawns with mature specimen trees, set back from Crosby Lane where it is bordered by a chain fence with iron posts. Land to the west and north is wooded, with the area between the house and Cape Cod Bay designated as marshland. An area north of the house has been cleared for an outdoor performance space and parking lots have been created east of that and near Crosby Lane. Two small wood frame outbuildings from the historic period are sited close to the road. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The Crosby Mansion, Tawasentha, at 163 Crosby Lane was built in 1888-89 for native son Albert Crosby (1823-1910) around the ca. 1835 homestead of his father Nathan Crosby (1793-1882) on the west side of Crosby Lane. One of the seven sons of INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.152 Nathan Crosby Sr. (1768-1838) and Anna Pinkham (1767-1854), Nathan Crosby began his working life as a tanner’s apprentice in Chatham and later bought the business; in 1835 he returned to East Brewster and built a center-chimney Cape Cod house on this property, not far from where he had been born, which his son incorporated into his mansion. According to nineteenth- century Barnstable County historian Simeon L. Deyo, Crosby then became the owner of numerous vessels and began commercial fishing. Albert Crosby, the eldest son of Nathan Crosby and his wife Catherine Nickerson Crosby (1801-85), is credited with having been the first in his family, and one of the earliest Cape Cod natives, who “went into the West to help make a great city of the muddy town of Chicago,” as one journalist put it. As a young man Albert Crosby had worked on merchant vessels running between Boston and the West Indies, and in May 1848 he went to Chicago with, it is said, $10,000 worth of “Boston goods” to trade. In the same year he established the liquor and tea trading firm Albert Crosby and Company. Also in that year, his uncle Isaac Crosby (1809-23) came to Chicago. In 1851, when Albert Crosby began in earnest to distill alcohol for pharmaceuticals, he was joined his cousin Uranus Harold Crosby (1831-1903), his uncle and Uranus’s father Roland, and two more of Albert’s uncles— Nathan and Theophilus. Crosby’s firm, according to one nineteenth-century Chicago history, “was the largest establishment of the kind in the West, and coined money for its proprietor until it was destroyed in the great fire of 1871.” Four years earlier Albert Crosby had acquired Crosby’s Opera House, founded by Uranus H. Crosby in 1865. In the summer of 1871 Albert raised $80,000 to redecorate the opera house, but the night before its grand reopening it too was destroyed in the Chicago fire. Crosby’s total losses were estimated at $1.5 million, but he built a two-story commercial building on the opera house site immediately. He also served as president of the Chicago City Railway Company, and in 1866 he became president of the Downer and Bemis Brewing Company in Chicago and was later vice president and superintendent of another Chicago brewery, Bemis and McAvoy .1 For all his financial success, Albert Crosby suffered profound losses from causes other than the Chicago fire as well as the sting of adverse publicity. In 1870 he sued the proprietors of the Chicago Times for alleging that the opera house was a “financial failure” and was the scene of all manner of illicit activity. In 1875 at least one Chicago newspaper covered in intimate detail Crosby’s acrimonious divorce from his first wife Margaret Henderson Crosby, who lived in West Roxbury with their four children.2 Margaret Crosby claimed that her husband had secured a divorce on false grounds of desertion in January 1872 and had by July that year married Matilda Georgia Sourbeck Telben Garrison (sometimes shown as Garretson), who had divorced her second husband at the same time. When Margaret learned of the marriage she filed a “long and sensational bill for divorce” against Albert.3 Crosby and his wife went abroad in 1874 and did not return to Chicago until 1884. Nathan Crosby returned to Brewster probably in the 1860s and lived in the 1835 house on the 163 Crosby Lane property until his death in 1882. Son Albert retired in 1887 and also came back to East Brewster. In 1888 Albert began to build an elaborate house around his late father’s home. Though some accounts, including Simeon Deyo’s 1890 county history, state the house was built to Crosby’s own design, the Boston Herald stated that the firm of Roach and Tilden of Boston were the architects.4 Both Arthur Roach (1850-1894) and George Thomas Tilden (1845-1919) were trained in architecture at MIT and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts before opening an office in Boston in 1880, and for the next fifteen years they were one of the most active firms in New England. The firm has many public buildings to its credit, and Tilden was active in the design of suburban homes and country houses.5 1 See “Cape Codmen and the Chicago Fire,” Barnstable Patriot, 24 October 1871, 2; A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago. From the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Chicago: A. T. Andreas Co., 1886), 577, and Simeon L. Deyo, ed,, History of Barnstable County, Mass. (New York: H. W. Blake Co., 1890), 915 (which appears to have been taken largely from Andreas’s Chicago history). The 1867 Chicago directory lists Albert Crosby as president of Downer & Bemis Brewing Company (actually Downer, Bemis and Company); the 1869 directory describes him as a manufacturer of alcohol and “high wines,” which are wines with a high alcohol content. Downer, Bemis and Company became Bemis and McAvoy Brewing Company in 1882, and in 1885 the directory shows Crosby at that firm’s vice president. 2 Margaret Henderson Crosby, the daughter of Scots immigrants to Nova Scotia. No record of their marriage appears to exist in Massachusetts. The couple’s children Miriam (Minnie), Anna, and Irene were born in Illinois between 1848 and 1854; son Albert U. H. was born in Massachusetts in 1862. Margaret Crosby lived on Cottage Street in West Roxbury and was listed as a widow in the 1885 Boston directory and on her 1909 death record, which claims her husband had been John Crosby. Her age and birthplace are consistent in all records. 3 The date of Crosby’s second marriage is roughly indicated in “Personal,” Chicago Post, 22 July 1872, 1: “Albert Crosby, late proprietor of the late Crosby Opera House, is stopping at the Sherman House with his bride, nee Georgie Telben.” Some sources give Matilda’s maiden name as Sourbeck. On the divorce action see “The Crosby Divorce Suit,” Daily Inter Ocean, 17 February 1875, 3; “The Crosby Divorce,” Daily Inter Ocean, 15 September 1875, 3, and “Crosby and His Fortune,” Boston Herald, 12 July 1899, 8. This last newspaper article stated that Matilda George Garretson was a singer at Crosby’s Opera House “in the old days.” 4 “The Finest on the Cape,” Boston Herald, 30 July 1888, 8. 5 Henry F. Withey & Elsie Rathburn Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American Architects (1956; LA: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1970), 600. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.152 At the end of October 1888 his cousin Elias Nickerson noted that Albert was “in the process” of constructing the house, but it was sufficiently complete for Nickerson to have been able to describe it as “built irregularly, with many gables and corners,” a tower 60 feet high, and 14 chimneys even as the house was equipped with steam heat.6 The house had 26 rooms and was built of wood except for a fireproof wing meant to function as a gallery to display the large collection of paintings and statuary that Crosby moved from his New York City winter home. The galley was a brick building with a galvanized iron roof, no windows save the ceiling skylight, and no exterior doors; two iron doors connected it to a hall of the main house. The numerous accounts of the building project described its incorporation of the Nathan Crosby house and its furnishings differently. Deyo’s history stated that “with filial care, [Crosby] has incorporated into a wing of the structure a portion of his father’s house.” Nickerson stated that “a number of rooms pertaining to the old homestead remain intact, within the mansion, to be unaltered, in remembrance of the old home.” The Boston Record stated that the new house was “built about and around the old family homestead, which was remodelled to coincide as nearly as possible with the style of the newer house.” Hudson Ellis, longtime caretaker for the mansion, stated in an interview of Albert’s treatment of the old house, “He built right over that. Well, that front part of that house was actually the end there that sticks out on the first floor, that’s the original old house. That part of it. . . he cut the roof right off, see. And went right over it. ‘Cause then when you go upstairs, when you come to that part you have to step down two steps, till you get on the floor.” Henry Haynie in the Boston Herald stated that Nathan Crosby’s house had been “was incorporated as part of the new residence, so that it is now really a part and parcel of the chateau”: You step directly from an elegant hall through a small-sized door—on its hither side it is painted and finished in keeping with the stairs, gallery and hall walls, but the other side is just as it was over 100 years ago—into an old manor house where the rooms are small, the ceilings low and all the furnishings very ancient. The bed, the chairs, the tableware, the kitchen dishes, the family portraits, the writing desk, the tall clock—all and everything is precisely as it was when Nathan, Jr., and his grandfather, Josiah, made use of them in the “good old days.”7 According to Nickerson, “Mr. Crosby informed me that all the permanent workmen were Cape men,” with the Yarmouth building firm John Hinckley and Son hired as the contractors. Before its construction the house was expected to cost between $30,000 and $40,000, but once complete it was said to have cost between $150,000 and $200,000.8 The Boston Record offered its view of the reaction of Brewster to the building project: “The simple inhabitants of the place have not ceased their open-mouthed wonder at the lavishness of the expenditure, and the name of Crosby has been invested with little short of a halo.”9 Crosby called the house Tawasentha, and Boston Herald termed it “the real chateau of Cape Cod” and added, “It is of elaborate, though tasteful ornamentation, and is surmounted by a tower that commands a fine view of Massachusetts bay. To this house Mrs. Crosby has brought all that taste and wealth can suggest to adorn her pleasant summer retreat, and here she and her excellent husband are at home to all the world on every Thursday.” The art gallery was also open to the public on that day, and the Herald stated that “on these days persons come 40 and 50 miles to see the Crosby gallery, and the average attendance of visitors is about 175.”10 Albert Crosby and his second wife Matilda continued to be dogged by trouble and controversy after their move to East Brewster. In 1896 a German-born female employee and her seven-year-old daughter were burned in the house, the mother dying instantly and the daughter several days later.11 Three years later Crosby filed for bankruptcy to avoid creditors, some of whom claimed Crosby still owned them money from the 1874 default of Chicago city treasurer David A. Gage, for whom Crosby had served as a surety. Crosby had signed his assets over to his wife Matilda and claimed to receive an allowance from her; he told the 6 Elias Nickerson, “A Palatial Residence in East Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 30 October 1888, 2. The number of chimneys in the house also varies by report, ranging from 13 to 18. 7 Deyo, ed., History of Barnstable County, 1915; Nickerson, “Palatial Residence”; “How Two Sons of the Cape Have Built Palatial Homes in Brewster [From the Boston Record],” Barnstable Patriot, 11 August 1891, 2; Hudson Ellis, interview with xxxxx, date, Brewster Ladies’ Library; Henry Haynie, “Cape Cod Towns and Homes,” Boston Herald, 22 August 1897, 35. 8 “The Finest on the Cape” and “How Two Sons.” 9 “How Two Sons of the Cape Have Built Palatial Homes in Brewster [From the Boston Record],” Barnstable Patriot, 11 August 1891, 2. 10 Haynie, “Cape Cod Towns and Homes.” 11 “Fatal Burning Accident in East Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 24 August 1896, 2, notes that “Mrs. Charles Holseborn,” a German woman employed on “the Albert Crosby place,” was “burned to a crisp” as she attempted to removed turpentine from the clothing of her 7-year-old daughter Mildred. Mildred had come in contact with “new painted woodwork” and was standing with her mother near the cookstove when they both caught fire. The Patriot noted that the Holseborn family had been planning to return to Germany the year before but had “induced to remain.” Massachusetts vital records document the death of 33-year-old Dora Holtzborn on 17 August 1896 and of her daughter Mildred, eight years old, on 20 August. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 BRE.152 bankruptcy referee “that she gives him enough for his personal expenses, which, say his creditors, is enough to pay for trips abroad and to support him in ease and luxury.” Brewster assessors’ records for 1896 show Albert as the owner of the house (valued at $28,000), a “dwelling for gardener” (probably what is now 190 Crosby Lane), the 20-acre homestead lot, and much other property, which suggests that he may not have transferred his property to his wife at that time, and Barnstable County deeds show no such transfer. A report in the Boston Herald stated that Nathan Crosby had left his homestead property to Matilda as well, which deeds document.12 “His creditors asserted that this old Cape Cod homestead has been elaborately beautified and transformed into a splendid mansion,” the Herald stated, and an Illinois newspaper reported that Crosby had sold “the magnificent old painting of the Yosemite valley,” probably by Albert Bierstadt, before he and his wife left for Europe in 1874. The attorney for the estate of one of Crosby’s creditors testified at trial that he had stumbled accidentally on Crosby’s East Brewster art gallery while on vacation in the East and there found “the long-lost Yosemite painting.”13 The outcome of the creditors’ legal action is unknown. Albert and Matilda Crosby are listed in the 1900 census at 163 Crosby Lane with the couple Theodore and Sarah Ann Sourbeck Gray. Sarah Ann Sourbeck was Matilda’s sister, and she and Theodore were the grandparents of later owner Dorothy Gray Brooks Holcombe.14 Albert Crosby died in East Brewster in July 1906, and his widow Matilda remained for part of the year in the Crosby Mansion until her own death, at her winter home in the District of Columbia, in March 1928. Assessors’ records for 1926 list her as owning the mansion, valued at $39,000, another house, the homestead lots of both properties, a stable, the art gallery, an ice house, an engine house, and 227 acres of land in five tracts; her total tax liability was $1,286.16. On 23-24 August 1929 Matilda Crosby’s “modern and antique furnishings” and art—described as paintings collectively worth more than $100,000 and “bronzes, including fine examples by Rodin, Bonhear, Mene, Carrier etc.”—were sold at auction at the mansion.15 Though the chain of title after Matilda Crosby’s death is not at all times clear, by 1934 her heirs had not paid taxes amounting to $11,031.20 on her East Brewster holdings, including the 18-acre parcel containing the house. The town took the then-vacant house and its home lot and sold them in September 1938 to Dorothy Gray Brooks Holcombe of Milwaukee, who owned substantial acreage to the north on Crosby Lane, was a devisee under the will of Matilda Crosby, and may have been related to her. In October 1938, a month after she acquired the estate, Holcombe sold it to the Cape Cod Institute of Music, then based in Wellfleet.16 The Cape Cod Institute of Music was an outgrowth of the Wellfleet Music Colony, founded in 1919 by Martha Atwood Baker, who was born in Dorchester to Wellfleet master mariner Simeon Atwood and his wife Martha Ann Burpee. In 1904 she married Reuben Rich Baker, son of Lorenzo Dow Baker (1840-1908), one of the founders of what became United Fruit Company. Martha Atwood Baker was a well-known mezzo soprano with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera; one Vermont newspaper described her as “one of the foremost singers of New England” in 1917. In the 1920s she studied in Italy and sang there with baritone Alessandro Albertini, whom she married in New York in January 1928, though she kept her stage name. Baker lost most of her money in the stock market crash of 1929 and declared bankruptcy in October 1931, but by 1938 she was able to acquire the Crosby mansion and several other parcels for her school.17 She appears to have run the institute until her death in 1950.18 By 1957 deeds indicate the property belonged to Isabel. T. Stewart, who sold it in that year to Morton 12 In fact, Nathan Crosby’s widow Catherine A. N. Crosby transferred her half-interest in the property to Matilda Georgia Crosby on 28 February 1888 (BCD 190:372), and the deed noted that Nathan Crosby’s will had conveyed a half-interest each to his widow and daughter-in-law. Assessors’ records for 1896 taxed Crosby on the two houses, the 20-acre homestead property, a stable, a horse, a cow, carriages, the art gallery valued at $3000, an engine house, “painting & statuary” valued at $25,000, a 170-acre woodland parcel, an acre of cranberry land, and $1000 in cash and securities. 13 See National Bankruptcy News, 15 October 1899, 526; “Petitions in Bankruptcy,” New York Tribune, 16 May 1899, 3, and New York Times, 16 May 1899, 9; “Crosby and His Fortune,” Boston Herald, 12 July 1899, 8; “Famous Litigation,” Daily Free Press (Carbondale IL), 9 June 1900, 2. 14 Matilda Georgia Crosby’s maiden name is given on genealogical websites as Sourbeck, but she is not shown as related to the Grays in the 1900 census. See Ann Longmore-Etheridge, “The Sourbeck Children: An American Family Entwined with the Rails,” “Your Dying Charlotte” website, https://dyingcharlotte.com/2016/11/05/sourbeck-dagerreotype/. 15 Boston Herald, 20 August 1929, 12: the Wm. K. MacKay Company auction announcement reads in part, “Modern and Antique Furnishings—Works of Art / Estate of the Late Matilda G. Crosby / to be sold on the Premises / East Brewster (Cape Cod), Mass. / Crosby Landing on Kings Highway—Route 6 / Friday and Saturday, Aug. 23-24.” I have found no account of the auction sale itself. 16 Town of Brewster Collector of Taxes, 5 September 1936, BCD 523:48-50, BCD 524:32-33; Town of Brewster to Dorothy Gray Brooks Holcombe, Milwaukee WI, 17 September 1938, BCD 544:108; Dorothy Gray Brooks Holcombe, Milwaukee WI, to Cape Cod Institute of Music Inc., Wellfleet, 31 October 1938, BCD 547:322; Helen N. Sears, Boston, to Cape Cod Institute of Music, Wellfleet, 20 February 1939, BCD 479:273. See also “Cape Cod School to Have New Quarters,” Boston Herald, 5 February 1939, 73. 17 Boston Post, 9 April 1916, 37, and 20 April 1916, 55; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 26 July 1931, 43; “Singer Bankrupt,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 29 October 1931, 1; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 5 May 1940, 18; “Mrs. Martha Baker, Noted Opera Singer, Dies on Cape Cod,” Hartford (CT) Courant, 8 April 1950, 3. 18 “Mrs. Martha Baker, Noted Opera Singer, Dies on Cape Cod,” Hartford (CT) Courant, 8 April 1950; “Martha Baker of Opera Dies,” Boston Herald, 8 April 1950, 11; “Former Opera Star Dies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 8 April 1950, 5. At some point Baker married a third time, to George R. Baker, an officer of Manufacturers Trust Company in New York and a native of Ohio of no known relation to her first husband; he died in October 1944. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 BRE.152 S. Grossman and Bernard C. Cohen of Gold Coast Realty Trust, which owned it for a little more than a year before selling it to Nutrition Services, Inc., of Belmont, which appears to have run the property as Seascape Camp for Girls. In 1985 Seascape, Inc., sold the property to John A. Spargo, and soon afterward the Commonwealth of Massachusetts took the property by eminent domain. The Friends of the Crosby Mansion assisted in the restoration of the mansion and continues to manage the state on behalf of the state. BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES American Ancestors.org. Massachusetts vital, tax, and probate records. Ancestry.com. Federal and state censuses, vital records, historic maps, and “Valuation List of the Town of Brewster 1890.” Barnstable Patriot Digital Newspaper Archive. Sturgis Library website, http://digital.olivesoftware.com/Olive/APA/Sturgis/default.aspx#panel=home. Brewster Assessors’ Records, Brewster Town Clerk Archives and 1926 Town Report. Deyo, Simeon L. History of Barnstable County, Mass. New York: H. W. Blake Co., 1890. Freeman, Frederick. The History of Cape Cod: The Annals of Barnstable County. Boston: George C. Rand and Avery, 1858-62. Otis, Amos. Genealogical Notes on Barnstable Families. 2 vols. Barnstable, MA: Patriot Press, 1888. Sears, Henry J. Brewster Ship Masters. Yarmouthport, MA: C. W. Swift, 1906. Simpkins, John. “Topographical Description of Brewster.” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 10 (1809): 72-79. MAPS Walling. Henry Francis. Map of the Counties of Barnstable, Dukes & Nantucket, Massachusetts. Boston: 1858. Atlas of Barnstable County, Massachusetts. Boston: George H. Walker & Co., 1880. Atlas of Barnstable County Massachusetts. Boston: Walker Lithograph & Publishing Co., 1910. Historic view of Tawasentha. Source: Simeon L. Deyo, History of Barnstable County, Mass. (1890), after 914. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 6 BRE.152 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View of Nathan Crosby homestead (ca. 1835) attached to rear of mansion, from SW. View from NE. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 7 BRE.152 View from north. View from west. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 8 BRE.152 View from SW. View of art gallery connector from south. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 9 BRE.152 View from SE. View of outbuildings from SW. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 10 BRE.152 Aerial view of property from south. Source: Google.com/maps. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 163 CROSBY LANE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 11 BRE.152 [Delete this page if no Criteria Statement is prepared] National Register of Historic Places Criteria Statement Form Check all that apply: Individually eligible Eligible only in a historic district Contributing to a potential historic district Potential historic district Criteria: A B C D Criteria Considerations: A B C D E F G Statement of Significance by_____Neil Larson___________________________________ The criteria that are checked in the above sections must be justified here. The Albert & Matilda Crosby House (Tawasentha), now known as the Crosby Mansion, appears eligible for the National Register under Criteria A and C for its historical and architectural significance. It was built in 1888-89 for Brewster native Albert Crosby on the lands on which his father, Nathan Crosby, a successful commercial fisherman and ship owner, had settled in the early 1800s. Nathan’s center-chimney Cape Cod house was preserved and incorporated into the rear of the large rambling mansion designed by the Boston architectural firm of Rotch and Tilden, which designed numerous country houses in the era. The lavish and eclectic architectural program of the house, as well as its scale, was out of character for the Cape and represents a demonstration of the wealth of a successful, returning son. As a young man Albert Crosby had worked on merchant vessels running between Boston and the West Indies, In 1848 he went to Chicago with “Boston goods” to trade where he. established the liquor and tea trading firm Albert Crosby and Company. A number of his brothers and cousins were engaged in the business, which began to distill alcohol for pharmaceuticals. This enterprise was destroyed in the great fire of 1871. He also served as president of the Chicago City Railway Company and was an officer of two breweries. The Crosby Mansion was constructed with a lighthouse tower in the roof and a large gallery for the Crosbys’ art collection, although both features are no longer extant. The property is currently owned by the state and operates as a historic house museum and entertainment facility.