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HomeMy Public PortalAboutHarwichRd_01-07Follow 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 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): November 2018 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 57-25-0 Harwich I BRE.123 BRE.476 NRHD 2/23/1996 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): Brewster Center Address:1-7 Harwich Road (NR listed as 1492 Main St.) Historic Name: Elkanah & Susan Winslow House & Barn Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1842 Source:deeds, historic atlases, vital statistics Style/Form: Greek Revival / end house Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood clapboard & wood shingles / wood Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: Barn (BRE.476), ca. 1850, repurposed for offices Major Alterations (with dates): Wagon house wing, enclosed for offices, ca. 2000 Ramp added to rear, ca. 2000 Window sash replaced, late 20th century Barn renovated, wing added, ca. 2000 Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:1.68 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 1-7 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 I BRE.123 BRE.476 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 Elkanah & Susan Winslow House (BRE.123), built ca. 1842, is a large story-and-a-half end house with its entrance contained in a porch recessed into the first story of the northwest corner. The entrance is positioned on the side wall at the inside corner of the porch; it has three-quarter side lights and is trimmed with wide, fluted boards and corner blocks. A tripartite window on the back wall is similarly decorated. The porch is supported by two fluted Doric columns that may be replacements. The corners of the house are distinguished by wide pilasters, including one in the half-story above the column supporting the northwest corner of the house. Characteristic of the Greek Revival style, tall friezes cap the side walls at the eave line. The raking edges of the gable end carry complex cornices but lack friezes. Three windows are located on the first story, two are contained in the front room on the south side of the house, and the third is paired with the porch on the entry side. Two upper- story windows are surmounted by a triangular light centered in the gable. While the sides of the house have clapboard siding, the street end is shingled, perhaps a later change in materials. The north side wall behind the porch contains four windows, tightly spaced, two in the main house and two in a rear wing; two upper-story windows appear to be additions, or at least to have been enlarged. The south side contains three windows, one in a front room and two in the rear. Large chimneys indicate the location of hearths in front and rear rooms. A small story-and-a-half service wing is recessed back from the southeast corner of the house and contains a secondary entrance. This wing may overlap into the front of the house to incorporate the rear chimney into a kitchen. A one-story back house and wagon house extends from the rear. Two arched vehicle openings have been infilled. A small, detached aisle barn (BRE.476), with a construction date probably somewhat later than the house, is sited behind it. Its front corners are distinguished with pilasters and roof edge with a cornice similar in manner to features on the house. A wide opening with wagon doors is centered on the façade and the aisle plan; a horizontal, multi-paned transom and door track survive above it, although the opening was infilled with a smaller door when the barn was renovated for office and meeting spaces. A one-story wing on the south side is a recent addition. The large parcel is landscaped with open lawn and a parking lot. The north and east sides are screened with foliage. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The house and barn now numbered 1-7 Harwich Road were built about 1842 for master mariner Elkanah Winslow and his second wife, the widow Susan Crocker Baker Winslow, on land earlier occupied by a double house built in the early 1820s by Freeman Mayo.1 Born in Brewster in 1802, Elkanah Winslow was the son of Joseph and Abigail Snow Winslow. He and his first wife, Mary Crocker Winslow (1805-41), had three children between 1835 and 1841—Joseph Crocker, Mary C., and Elkanah Jr.—but only Mary lived into adulthood. In 1841 and 1842 Winslow lost his wife and children Joseph and Elkanah, and in 1842 he married his first wife’s younger sister Susan (1817-1900). She was then 25 years old and already a widow: her first husband, master mariner Franklin Baker, was lost at sea on a West Indies trading voyage in March 1840, only seven months after their marriage. The 1850 census lists Elkanah Winslow as a 46-year-old mariner with $3299 in real property in a household with his wife Susan and his daughter Mary C., then 15 and working in domestic service. Like Franklin Baker, Elkanah Winslow was also master of vessels in the West Indian trade, and he too died abroad, in Manzanilla, Mexico, on 4 July 1851; he is buried there.2 The 1858 1 In 1842, the brothers Freeman and Caleb Strong Mayo sold 30 acres with buildings to Elkanah Winslow for a total price of $800; see Caleb S. Mayo, Newfane, VT, to Elkanah Winslow, 27 October 1842, 31, and Freeman Mayo to Elkanah Winslow, 14 November 1842, BCD 29:536, the second of which deeded the west half of the house and the land it stood on. The first deed stated that the property passed to them from their father Thomas. See Thomas Mayo to Freeman Mayo, 12 December 1823, BCD 999011:139, which sold to Freeman for ten dollars “the land on which he had built the western part of the dwelling house adjoining and connected with mine, with privileges of all the avenues leading thereto, and a free passage around the part which he has erected; with privilege of passing to and from an outbuilding at the northeast part of my said dwelling house, which the said Freeman has built, and the land on which said building stands.” 2 J. Henry Sears, Brewster Ship Masters (Yarmouthport, MA: C. W. Swift, 1906), 6, 73-74. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1-7 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 I BRE.123 BRE.476 Brewster map attaches the name “Mrs. Winslow” to the house, and the 1860 census clearly indicates that she was living there. She shared the house with her stepdaughter Mary and Mary’s husband Charles Crosby, a master mariner whom she had married in 1858; he was the son of Freeman and Rebecca Crosby. Also occupying the house was the Crosbys’ infant daughter Angeline and the mariner Hiram Bangs and his wife Ida. In 1862, Mary Winslow Crosby accompanied her husband on a voyage, and daughter Rebecca was born at sea in that year. In 1864 the couple’s third child, Charles Jr., was born. In the same year, Charles Crosby also died abroad when his weapon accidentally discharged on a gunning expedition at Bassein (probably in India) and killed him. He was 31 years old.3 The 1865 census seems to show Crosby and her three young children elsewhere in Brewster. Nor does her stepmother Susan, who in 1861 had married again to 70-year-old master mariner Winslow Lewis Knowles Sr., appear in this section of town. In January 1870 Winslow L. Knowles died, and his will left his second wife Susan the income of $2500, to be paid to her annually for the rest of her life, and all the furniture she had brought into the marriage. The 1870 census lists Susan C. Knowles as a 54-year-old housekeeper with no real property living alone in this neighborhood. The enumeration order of the census seems to show her stepdaughter Mary Crosby at 1-7 Brewster Road with her children and $2500 in real estate. By 1880, Mary Crosby had moved with her children to Boston, where he worked as a nurse, boarded in a private home, and later had her own home in Roxbury; in 1880 daughter Angelina was a schoolteacher who boarded in Chelsea with her younger sister Rebecca, a dry goods store clerk, in the home of carpenter William Phinney. The 1880 census attaches the name “Mrs. W. Knowles” to the property, and the Barnstable Patriot documents the visits of Mary Crosby and her daughters Angelina and Rebecca to “Mrs. Winslow Knowles” in Brewster.4 Susan Crocker Knowles died in January 1900, and her will, written a year earlier, left her entire estate to “my beloved step- daughter, Mary C. Crosby.” By then Crosby had returned to Brewster from Boston, and newspapers make clear that she spent summers at 1-7 Harwich Road and winters with her daughters in the Boston area.5 Both were married: in 1899 Rebecca married William P. Nightingale, a native of Quincy who was then an accountant for the Boston Journal, and in 1895 eldest daughter Angeline married the clergyman William R. Campbell, a native of Illinois then living in Boston.6 The 1910 map attaches the name ”M. C. Crosby” to the 1-7 Harwich Road property. In 1917 Mary Crosby sold the 1-7 Harwich Road parcel to her daughter Angeline Campbell, and Crosby died four years later. The Campbells used the house as a summer home, and in 1925 they deeded the property to her sister Rebecca and her husband William P. Nightingale.7 In 1932, after the death of Angeline Crosby Campbell, William Campbell deeded any interest he had in his late wife’s property to Rebecca Nightingale, and the next year her brother Charles did the same. Rebecca Crosby Nightingale died in July 1934, and within weeks her husband conveyed 1-7 Harwich Road to their daughter Lois, born in 1897, and her husband Edward W. Blue, then living in the Auburndale section of Newton.8 The Blues owned the property until 1980, when Lois Blue sold it to Special Care Nursing Services of Orleans; thus ended nearly 140 years of Winslow-Crosby ownership. The nursing group sold the property five years later to John M. and Paula A. Chaffee, the Paula Chaffee, later wife of Michael Gilmour, sold 1-7 Harwich Road to First Parish of Brewster in 1999, which owned the building and used it as a thrift shop in 2018.9 3 Sears, Brewster Ship Masters, 22-23; “Fatal Accident,” Barnstable Patriot, 23 August 1864, 2. 4 Crosby is listed between W. W. Knowles and the “unoccupied” parsonage just north of this house, at the corner of Main Street and Harwich Road. See “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 19 August 1884, 1, and 21 January 1890, 3. 5 Barnstable Patriot, 28 November 1904, 3, 10 August 1908, 3, 25 July 1911, 3. 6 See “Nightingale-Crosby,” Barnstable Patriot, 18 June 1889, 3. Nightingale was advertising agent for the Boston Globe by 1918. 7 Mary C. Crosby to Angeline C. Campbell, Boston, 9 May 1917, BCD 356:202; Angeline and William R. Campbell, Boston, and Rebecca and W. P. Nightingale, Arlington, to Charles Crosby, 8 October 1925, SECD 384:322. See also 8 William R. Campbell, Roxbury, to Rebecca C. Nightingale, Arlington, and Charles Crosby, Brewster, 8 November 1932, BCD 492:157l; Charles Crosby to Rebecca Nightingale, Arlington, 15 July 1933, BCD 495:552; William P. Nightingale, Arlington, to Lois N. and Edward W. Blue, Auburndale, 3 August 1934, BCD 505:44. 9 Lois N. Blue to Special Care Nursing Services Inc., Orleans, 7 May 1980, SECD 3094:163; Special Care Nursing Services Inc., Orleans, to John M. and Paula A. Chaffee, 1 July 1985, BCD 4609:180; Michael D. and Paula A. Gilmour, 1942 Main Street to First Parish Brewster, 1969 Main Street, 2 April 1999, BCD 12175:209. See also Special Permit 2016-16, 3 October 2016, BCD 29979:288, which permitted changed two lower-level classrooms to a thrift shop. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1-7 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 I BRE.123 BRE.476 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. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1-7 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 I BRE.123 BRE.476 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View from south. View of barn from west.