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FORM B BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
View from west
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
115-15 Harwich BRE.169
BRE.450
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
East Brewster
Address:190 Crosby Lane
Historic Name:Crosby Mansion Gardener’s Cottage & Barn
Uses:Present: single family residence
Original: single family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1855, ca. 1889
Source:deeds, historic atlases, appearance
Style/Form: Greek Revival
Architect/Builder: unknown
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick
Wall/Trim: wood shingles
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
barn
Major Alterations (with dates):
Window sash replaced
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date: ca. 1889
Acreage:0.82 acre
Setting: The house is situated in a dense residential area
characterized by summer cottages and retirement homes
built in the mid-20th century.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 190 CROSBY LANE
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
BRE.169
BRE.450
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 Gardener’s Cottage is a story-and-a-half wood frame single dwelling with a cross-wing plan. The front-
gable core appears to have been moved to the site in ca. 1889 with the wing having been enlarged or added. The front façade
has corner pilasters, a gable finished as a broken-bed pediment, and modest frieze boards running under the eaves. The first
and second stories each contain two windows with the entrance located on the north side of the building where the two sections
intersect. A veranda fronted by lattice-work piers spans the gable front and wraps on to both sides and, at the entrance on the
north side turns to cover half of the wing. The entrance has been enveloped in a shallow vestibule. The front façade of the wing
contains three windows and a door at the extreme northern end. A center chimney indicates two interior rooms with a kitchen
closest to the main section. Hipped-roof dormers are positioned in the front and rear of the wing and a one-story ell extends from
the rear.
A small aisle barn with a steep front-gable roof is sited behind and south of the house. Two overhead doors have been added to
the first story; a single window is centered in the gable. A small yard borders the house on all sides with wood picket fence
running along the frontage and a driveway entering south of the house and terminating at the barn.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
Historic maps published between 1858 and 1905 do not depict a dwelling in this location; however, an image in Deyo’s 1890
History of Barnstable includes it in a view from the Crosby Mansion (see below). The house appears to have been constructed
prior to this date, more like in the 1850s which raises the question of it being a moved building. Its association with Tawasentha,
Albert and Matilda Crosby’s mansion at 163 Crosby Land, suggests that the house was brought in as part of their extensive
redevelopment of Nathan Crosby’s Jr.’s homestead in 1888-89. The house may have been moved from 36 Crosby Lane, closer
to Main Street, another Crosby property in transition. This speculation is supported by the observation that the current house at
#36 appears to have been constructed in this period.
Local historians describe the subject house as the Crosby Mansion gardener’s cottage, and tax records for 1892 list a “dwelling
for gardener” valued at $300 among the real property owned by Albert Crosby. Twenty years after his death in 1906, his widow
Matilda Georgia Crosby was taxed on two houses—the Crosby Mansion assessed at $39,000 and another dwelling valued at
$900—and two homestead lots, the one attached to the second house being four acres.
Who initially occupied the gardener’s cottage cannot be determined from census records, though it might have been the home of
Isaac S. Small, who is one of only three persons not bearing the Crosby surname living on Crosby Lane in the 1901 Cape Cod
directory.1 The 1900 census lists Small as a “house manager” two households before Albert Crosby’s, but both the 1901
directory and the account of his death seven years later make clear that he was working at Fieldstone Hall on Main Street for
Samuel Mayo Nickerson, whose wife was one of Albert Crosby’s first cousins.2
In 1914 Hudson Ellis came to live at 190 Crosby Lane and work for Albert Crosby’s widow Matilda Georgia Crosby, who after her
husband’s death continued to live in her mansion with her sister, Sarah Ann Sourbeck Gray, who died in East Brewster in 1920,
and Sarah’s daughter Margaret Anna Gray Brooks. “Of course, they used to go away winters,” Ellis said in an interview. “They
would come back early spring, she would. She’d get the house ready and then her sister who was an invalid, . . . she and her
niece would come together, stay the rest of the summer, and then come fall, they’d go in October, back to Washington. So, that
went on for a good many years.”3
1 The other two are Theodore Gray, who lived at the Crosby Mansion with his wife Sarah, and Charles F. Johnson, a gardener whose house is described as
being at the “foot” of Crosby Lane.
2 See “Accidentally Killed,” Hyannis Patriot, 9 March 1908, 2.Small died instantly, and both this newspaper account and his death record indicate that he was
struck in the head by a crank as he tried to start an automobile
3 Hudson Ellis, interview with xxxxx, date, Brewster Ladies’ Library. Theodore Gray, born in Hudson, New York in 1834, married Sarah Ann Sourbeck (1841-
1920) of Pennsylvania, and the couple and most of their children were living in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1870; Theodore Gray was then a railroad conductor.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 190 CROSBY LANE
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
BRE.169
BRE.450
Born in Brewster about 1882, Hudson Ellis was the son of Benjamin T. and Relief Cook Ellis. He was working as a laborer in
Brewster in 1903 when he married Aurilla Walker, the daughter of Enoch and Mary C. Perry Walker of Brewster. By 1910 he was
working as a laborer for a “private family,” very likely the Nickersons, and living in the home of grocer Eugene F. Doane with his
wife and son Lloyd, born in 1904. The 1920 census lists Ellis as a private chauffeur, and by 1929 the Cape Cod directory shows
him as a caretaker living on Linnell Road. This last entry may have been an error, as by his own account Ellis lived at 190
Crosby until about 1942. In 1929 Ellis had acquired land from the Brooks sisters Margaret and Dorothy, to whom Matilda G.
Crosby had bequeathed it, but it was not the 190 Crosby Lane lot.4
Dorothy Gray Brooks Holcombe owned 190 Crosby Lane until she died in 1976, and the next year her executor sold it to John
Alden Spargo of Orleans, who subdivided the large lot. Spargo sold the lot with 190 Crosby Lane standing on it to Pearl P.
Rosenberg of St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1980, who between 1994 and 1999 sold part-interests in the property to Lois Kugler of
Radford, Virginia. Lois and Peter Kugler were the owners of record in 2004.5
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.
Matilda Georgia Sourbeck (later Crosby), born in 1843, was Sarah Ann Sourbeck Gray’s younger sister. Their father, John Sourbeck, drowned in 1847, and by
1850 their widowed mother was living in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, with younger children Sarah Ann, Matilda Georgia, and William Henry Harrison
Sourbeck. In 1886 Margaret Anna Gray married Edward Cranston Brooks, a West Point graduate and Army lieutenant, and they had two daughters—Margaret
Crosby Cranston Brooks (1889-1962) and Dorothy Gray Brooks (1892-1976). The use of Crosby as a middle name suggests kinship with the East Brewster
Crosbys. According to the Hyannis Patriot (31 July 1894, 3), Edward C. and Margaret Gray Brooks had been summer residents of East Brewster since at least
1894; their five-month-old son Edward C. Brooks Jr. died in Brewster on 1 May 1894.
4 Margaret B. Johnson and Dorothy Gray Holcombe, both Washington DC, to Hudson Ellis, 31 August 1929, BCD 475:392. The Brooks sisters had by then
married career military officers: in 1910 Margaret married Lucius Warren Johnson, a Navy physician and rear admiral, and Dorothy married Brigadier General
William H. Holcombe of the Army Corps of Engineers. In 1956 Ellis described the parcel the sisters had sold him in 1929 as “swamp” when he sold it to
Washington E. and Mary F. Chase (BCD 959:472).
5 William H. Holcombe, executor will Dorothy Brooks Holcombe, Mt Vernon VA, to John Alden Spargo, Orleans, 7 November 1977, Certificate of Title 72782;
John Alden Spargo to Pearl P. Rosenberg, St. Paul MN, 26 January 1980, Certificate of Title 80818; Pearl P. Rosenberg, St. Paul MN, to Lois Kugler, Radford
VA, 21 December 1994, Certificate of Title 136192; Pearl P. Rosenberg, St. Paul MN, to Lois Kugler, 190 Crosby Lane, 27 August 1999, Certificate of Title
154616; Lois and Peter Kugler, 190 Crosby Lane, and Carl E. Rosenburg, Cleveland Heights OH, trustee Pearl P. Rosenberg Revocable Trust, to Peter and
Lois Kugler, 5 August 2004, Certificate of Title 177472. The 190 Crosby Lane house is shown on “Plan of Land in Brewster,” 20 April 1929, Land Court Plan
17161-A, and is Lot 7 on “Sudivision Plan of Land in Brewster,” 16 August 1977, Land Court Plan 17161-C.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 190 CROSBY LANE
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
BRE.169
BRE.450
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018)
View from SW.
View from NW.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 190 CROSBY LANE
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 4
BRE.169
BRE.450
View of barn from west.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 190 CROSBY LANE
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 5
BRE.169
BRE.450
[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 Crosby Mansion Gardner’s Cottage & Barn appear eligible for the National Register as components of the
Crosby Mansion (BRE.152). While appearing to have been moved to this location in ca. 1889, the house and barn
retain distinguishing characteristics of mid-19th-century front-gable cottage, a common Cape Cod house type, and
a rare associated barn..