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Home My Public Portal AboutFosterRd_21Follow 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 78-50 Harwich BRE.451 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): East Brewster Address:21 Foster Road Historic Name: Sea Pines School Cottage Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1920 Source:deeds, plans, historic atlases Style/Form: Colonial Revival Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: concrete Wall/Trim: wood shingles Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: none Major Alterations (with dates): Studio wing added mid-20th century Garage addition on north end, late 20th century Window sash replaced Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:0.67 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 21 FOSTER ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.451 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 Sea Pines School Cottage is a one-story, wood frame single dwelling with a gable roof and a center chimney plan built ca. 1920 in a Colonial Revival replica of the traditional Cape Cod house. The five-bay front façade contains a center entrance with sidelights flanked by fluted pilasters. The chimney is off-center. Later in the 20th century a one-story wing with extensive windows was added to the south end with the roof cut out to avoid covering a window in the south gable end of the house. A short wing on the north end may be an original feature along with a shed dormer on the rear. A three-car garage has been added on the north side of the house and connected to the extant wing by a short breezeway. The house is built out close to its lot lines on all sides set back behind small yards. A driveway enters the north end of the frontage and terminates at the garage. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The house at 21 Foster Road occupies a one-acre lot subdivided in 1930 from the Sea Pines School property, a school for girls established by Thomas Bickford, Jr. in 1910. The institution occupied 300 acres between Main Street and Cape Cod Bay. The area where the subject is located had been owned by Freeman Foster and was sold by his heirs in 1874 to Universalist minister Cyrus A. Bradley, who had married Foster’s daughter Lucretia in Brewster in 1855.1 The 1880 Barnstable County map attaches the name C. A. Bradley to a house now at 2449 Main Street (BRE.163), near the northeast corner of the intersection of Main Street and Foster Road, that had been built by Freeman Foster’s grandfather Chillingsworth Foster (1680-1764). The 1880 census lists Bradley and his wife and Lucretia’s widowed sister Martha Foster Mayo (`1817-99). In 1913, seven years after Bradley’s death, his son Asa, a Universalist minister in Portland, Maine, sold the property to Thomas Bickford Jr. (1853-1917), also a minister.2 Bickford was the son of New York City native Thomas Bickford (1819-93), who worked as a steamfitter, and his wife Temperance Snow Foster (1823-95), a Brewster native and daughter of Solomon Foster who lived most of her life in Chelsea, where Thomas Jr. was born. His parents had spent summers in Brewster since at least the mid- 1880s. Bickford earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Colby College in Maine and then preached in a Baptist church in Lowville New York from 1875 to 1878. He married Anna M. Searl in the latter year and in 1880 became a Congregationalist. He held pastorates in Troy, New York; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Bradford, Connecticut; Springfield, Vermont; and Stoughton. During this last service he, his wife, and their daughter Faith appear to have spent summers in East Brewster.3 In 1909 Bickford moved his family to West Harwich, where he had rented the former Central House hotel with the aim of beginning a boarding school for girls. The Sea Pines School, as it was called, operated for less than three months before it burned to the ground in December 1909, and the Bickfords returned to East Brewster. In the fall of 1910 they built a new school in East Brewster, probably on land his mother Temperance had deeded to him in 1894, and the family rented a house from the Cowen family.4 Newspapers indicate that Bickford built a second “school building” in 1911. Sea Pines School of Personality for Girls combined traditional school subjects “with music and art under exceptional home conditions and with much outdoor life, all for the development of the personality of each student,” Bickford’s obituary stated; an advertisement for the school offered “happy home life; personal attention and care. Students inspired by wholesome and beautiful ideals of efficient womanhood.”5 The house at 21 Foster Road seems to have been built for use by the school. 1 Mehitable and Tully Crosby, Sarah H. and Elisha Bangs, William L. and Matilda H. Foster, and Martha F. Mayo to C. A. Bradley, Yarmouth, 28 May 1874, BCD 116:158. 2 Asa M. Bradley, Portland ME, to Thomas Bickford, 17 July 1913, BCD 325:173. 3 Barnstable Patriot, 7 October 1895, 5; 20 April 1903, 3; 10 July 1905, 2; 11 May 1908, 4; 24 May 1909, 3, all indicate that the family had a summer house and traveled back and forth to Stoughton, where he was first employed in April 1903. 4 Temperance S. Bickford to Thomas Bickford, Springfield VT, 28 June 1894, BCD 214:93. 5 Advertisement for Sea Pines School for Personality for Girls, World’s Work, August 1916; “Death of Rev. Thomas Bickford of Brewster,” Hyannis Patriot, 9 July 1917, 2. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 21 FOSTER ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.451 In 1916 the Bickfords’ daughter Faith (1882-1964), who had been working since 1910 as a teacher in another private school her father ran in Bourne, was acting as co-principal of Sea Pines School with her father, who died the following year. She and her widowed mother were living on Main Street in 1920 and boarding teachers and staff. In 1926 Anna Bickford was taxed on four houses (one marked “Bradley,” one marked “FSA,” a third on Depot Road, and the fourth not described), the seminary building (2553 Main St.), 35 cottages, a camp, a bath house, numerous outbuildings, five homestead parcels, and other land; she paid $1,613.57 in taxes. After her mother’s death in 1930 Faith Bickford carried on the school and its summer camp on her own and continued to board teachers and staff in her home. In 1933 she subdivided the acreage her father had accumulated in this part of East Brewster and set off the 21 Foster House on a narrow, one-acre lot. In 1936 she sold the house and lot to Elbridge C. and Lillian S. Merrill of Fall River.6 Elbridge Clarence Merrill, born in Reading about 1879, was president of mill supply manufacturer O. B. Wetherell and Son Company from about 1919 to 1936. He and his wife Lillian Mason Scoville Merrill had one daughter, Dorothy, born in 1910. The Merrills owned 21 Foster Road until Elbridge Merrill died in 1969, and he left the property to his daughter, then Dorothy Merrill Ritter of Indianapolis. The property was placed in trust in 2001 and remained in the Ritter family in 2012.7 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. 6 Faith Bickford to Elbridge C. and Lillian S. Merrill, Fall River, 25 July 1936, BCD 522:159. The 21 Foster Road house and lot are shown as Section C on “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass Belonging to Faith Bickford and Amy E. Hooper,” 31 October 1933, revised 12 February 1934, BCP 49:13. 7 Dorothy M. Ritter, Indianapolis IN, to Dwight S. and Jo Ann M. Ritter, Norwell, 29 November 1990, BCD 7382:49; Dwight S. and Jo Ann M. Ritter, 21 Foster Road, to Dwight S. and Jo Ann M. Ritter, trustees Ritter Nominee Trust, 5 September 2001, BCD 14221:35; Dwight S. and Jo Ann M. Ritter, trustees Ritter Nominee Trust, to Dwight S. Ritter, trust Dwight S. Ritter Revocable Living Trust, and Jo Ann M. Ritter, trustee Jo Ann M. Ritter Revocable Living Trust, 7 June 2012, BCD 26409:214. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 21 FOSTER ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.451 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View from SE. View from NE.