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FORM B BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
View from NW.
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
55-144 Harwich BRE.480
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
South Brewster
Address:437 Harwich Road
Historic Name: Eldridge-Perry House
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1869
Source:deeds, historic atlases, censuses
Style/Form: Greek Revival / cross-wing
Architect/Builder: Lewis Y. Eldridge, probable builder
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick, stone, concrete block
Wall/Trim: wood clapboard / wood
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Barn, garage, shed, all recent construction
Stone retaining wall
Major Alterations (with dates):
Concrete block foundation added north wing
Porch removed from front of wing
Front entrance relocated, window infilled,stoop added
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage:1.61
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 437 HARWICH ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
BRE.480
Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form.
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION:
Eldridge-Perry House, built ca. 1869, is a large story-and-a-half end house with a one-story cross-gable kitchen and service
wing. The façade of the front-gable section is distinguished by paneled pilasters in the corners and projecting cornices along the
raking eaves with short returns at the base. It contains three windows on the first story, one of them blind, two on the upper
story, and a small arched window in the apex. The north side has the same pronounced eaves and cornice carried on a tall
frieze mounted on the tops of the corner pilasters. There are three windows spaced across the side wall, the rear one of which is
blind. The entrance is tucked in the front of the south wall in the space in front of the cross wing. It is not particularly embellished,
and the door has been replaced. A paneled pilaster to the left of the doorway indicates a porch covered the entry (there is now a
brick stoop), but how far it extended across the front façade of the wing is unclear. A brick facing on the front side of the
foundation was not intended to have been concealed under a porch. A blank space between groups of two windows, as well as
the chimney above it, represent the location of the kitchen hearth on the interior. A single window is centered in the south gable
end of the wing. A short ell is attached to the rear of the wing with its south wall in the same plane as the end of the wing. Both
sections have paneled corner pilasters, deep eaves, projecting cornices, and frieze boards.
The house is sited near the corner of Harwich and Tubman Roads and is set back behind small yards; a stone retaining wall
bisecting the Harwich Road frontage indicates the previous location of the road closer to the house. Larger yards exist on the
east and south sides of the house. A small barn and two-car garage, both of recent construction, are sited in the yard southeast
of the house; they are linked by a driveway to Harwich Road. A small shed is located closer to the road. The southern part of the
property is wooded.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
In July 1869, Brewster farmer and stone cutter Jeremiah Eldridge sold 80 rods of cleared land north of his own homestead to his
son Lewis Y. Eldridge, a house carpenter who very likely built the house that the deed identifies as then standing on the lot, at
the southeast corner of Harwich and Tubman Roads.1 Born in Brewster in 1843, Lewis Eldridge is listed in the 1870 census as a
carpenter with $1000 in real property, but he was then still living in his father’s household with his stepmother Rhoda and two of
his six siblings. It seems likely that the built the house to sell or as a home for himself and his future wife: in late November that
year he married Abbie T. Eldridge of Harwich. Probably by early 1875 the Eldridges moved to Yarmouth, where Lewis and his
brothers Jeremiah Jr. and Harrison worked as house carpenters and lived near each other by 1880.
In late December 1874 Lewis Eldridge sold 437 Harwich Road to Benjamin F. Eldridge, probably his brother-in-law, for $550.2
Two days later Benjamin Eldridge took out a $300 mortgage with Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, and by February 1878 he
had defaulted on the loan. In February 1878 the bank sold 437 Harwich Road to Brewster butcher Francis Baker for $280 at
auction. Baker, however, died less than a month later, and his estate sold the property to Baker’s son Henry E. Baker for $175 in
April 1879. Henry E. Baker sold it in November 1880 to Francis H. Perry, whose family became its first long-term owner.3
Born in Sandwich in 1855, Francis Howard Perry, usually called Frank, was a fisherman and mariner. By the time he was 18
years old he was living in Brewster, and in that year, he married Rebecca H. Bassett, the daughter of Franklin and Huldah
Eldredge Bassett. The 1880 census identifies him as a fisherman, and articles in the Barnstable Patriot make clear that he was
1 Jeremiah Eldredge to Lewis Y. Eldredge, 10 July 1869, BCD 100:161. The surname of this branch of the family is later almost always spelled
Eldridge.
2 Lewis Y. Eldridge to Benjamin F. Eldridge, 30 December 1874, BCD 120:64. Two Benjamin F. Eldridges lived in Harwich at the time, one the
son of Benjamin H. and Susan Eldridge (the parents of Abbie T. Eldridge) and the other the son of Ebenezer and Elizabeth Eldridge; both were
born in 1846.
3 Benjamin F. Eldridge to Francis Baker, 15 February 1878, BCD 134:510, documents the bank’s auction of the property; Mary C. and Henry E.
Baker, administrators estate Francis Baker, to Laura E. Baker, 26 April 1879, BCD 94:423; Laura E Baker to Henry E Baker, 26 April 1879,
BCD 140:285; Henry E. Baker to Francis H. Perry, 20 November 1880, 143:544.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 437 HARWICH ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
BRE.480
commanding vessels at least by the late 1880s. By about 1895 he was part-owner of the schooner Mertis H. Perry, named for
his daughter; the vessel cost $1700 to build and was wrecked in a “devastating” storm that hit Cape Cod in December 1898.4
The 1900 census lists Frank and Rebecca Perry in this house with son Nelson, a carpenter, daughter Mertis, a milliner, and son
Everett, still in school.
In May 1903 Rebecca Bassett Perry died, and in April 1907 Frank Perry remarried, to Robert G. Freeman, the daughter of John
and Jane S. Nickerson Freeman of Brewster.5 In 1909 Perry sold 437 Harwich Road to Miller B. Bassett, his first wife’s brother.6
The 1910 Brewster map, however, attaches Perry’s name to the 437 Harwich Road house.
Born in 1858 in Harwich, Miller Bassett was a mariner, and in 1880 he married Mary Josephine Newcomb, daughter of Joseph
C. and Mary A. Newcomb of Brewster. They lived in this neighborhood, and the 1880 census lists Miller Basset and his new wife
in her parents’ home. Mary J. Bassett died in 1888, of puerperal fever, at the age of 25 and left her husband with five small
children.7 Miller Bassett was himself very ill with rheumatic fever only months later, but he had recovered by May of 1888 and
was again fishing with Frank Perry, the former owner of his house, and Alvin Crowell.8
In May 1898 Miller Bassett married again, to Florence Newcomb of Brewster; her relation if any to Bassett’s first wife is unclear,
but they were not sisters. In 1900 Basset was renting in Brewster and working as a day laborer, and his household includes wife
Florence, children Wallace, Eva, and Harry (born between 1881 and 1886), and son Winthrop N., born in 1898. In 1900 the
census lists the Bassetts in this neighborhood, but in 1905 they moved to “the Woodworth farm,” where Miller Bassett worked.
After buying the 437 Harwich Road house, they rented it to Joseph Disch and his family, summer residents from Chicago.9 By
1920 Miller and Florence Bassett appear to be living on Harwich Road with their children Rebecca F., Virginia, and Kenneth. By
the late 1920s Miller Bassett was the town hall janitor and by 1929 the janitor for the town’s public schools; in 1930 he and his
wife lived at 437 Harwich Road with son Miller B. Jr., born in 1923.
Florence Newcomb Bassett died in 1933; Miller Bassett died five years later. The 1940 census lists son Kenneth—then the town
hall janitor, as his father once had been—in the house with his wife Clara and their children Harold and Alfred and Kenneth’s
much younger brother Miller Jr. In 1947 Kenneth Bassett sold 437 Harwich Road to James McClintock Jr. and Marion H.
McClintock. Nine years later James McClintock, then living in Columbus, Ohio, transferred title to his former wife Marion, then of
Fairfield, Connecticut. By December 1961 she had remarried (to Harry Robert Eckhardt) and recorded a plan of the property, by
then 6.541 acres ranging from the intersection east along Tubman Road.10 Marion H. Eckhardt died in March 2008, and her
executors subdivided her property, then 6.69 acres, into four house lots of roughly equal size in January 2009. The 437 Harwich
Road (shown as 439 on the plan) house and a shed, “old well house,” and studio/garage stand on a 1.61-acre Lot 1.11 They sold
Lots 1-3 to Margaret A. Gittinger of Orleans (one of Eckhardt’s executors), and Bonnie Lou Henne of 568 Tubman Road, which
stood on Lot 2. On the same day Henne transferred title to Lot 1 to Gittinger. Gittinger was owner of record in 2018.12
4 “The Great Storm,” Barnstable Patriot, 5 December 1898, 2. The article states that Moses McKinney, one of the crew of the Mertis H. Perry,
stated “that the crew saved themselves by crawling to land off the bowsprit.” See also “South Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 7 June 1887,3.
5 Just two months before her death, Rebecca Perry and her husband were passengers on board the steamer Plymouth when it was struck in
heavy fog by the steamer City of Taunton between Gull Island in New York and Point Judith in Rhode Island. Only one of some 550-600
passengers was killed, but five crew members, all of them men of color working in the steward’s department and sleeping in the forward cabin
quarters provided for “colored help,” were drowned. See “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 30 March 1903, 3; Reports of the Department of
Commerce and Labor 1904 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905), 396, and “Quick Action Saved Panic,” Boston Globe, 20 March
1903, 9. Roberta Freeman Perry died in September 1929; Frank H. Perry died in June 1945.
6 Francis H. Perry et al to Miller B. Bassett, 28 October 1909, BCD 297:313; see also “Brewster,” Hyannis Patriot, 25 October 1909, 3: “Capt.
Francis H. Perry has sold his house in South Brewster to Mr. Miller Bassett.”
7 “South Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 15 May 1888, 5. This article states that the couple had five children, but only three appear to be listed in
Brewster vital records.
8 “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 29 May 1888, 5.
9 “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 8 May 1905, 2; “Brewster,” Sandwich Observer, 2 May 1911, 3.
10 “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass. as Surveyed for Marion H. Eckhardt (Mrs. H. Robert), December 1961, BCP 169:141.
11 “Plan of Land in Brewster, MA Prepared for Estate of Marion Eckhardt,” 26 January 2009, BCP 629:6.
12 Kenneth Earl Bassett, trustee will Miller B. Bassett, to James McClintock Jr. and Marion H. McClintock, 25 July 1947, BCD 675:192; James
M. McClintock Jr., Columbus OH, to Marion H. McClintock, Fairfield CT, 16 April 1956, BCD 947:550; Christopher Gittinger and William D.
Crowell, trustees Marion H. Eckhardt Trust, and Margaret A. Gittinger, executor estate Marion H. Eckhardt, to Margaret A. Gittinger, Orleans,
and Bonnie Lou Henne, 568 Tubman Road, 16 March 2010, BCD 24445:123; Margaret A. Gittinger, Orleans, and Bonnie Lou Henne, 568
Tubman Road, to Margaret A. Gittinger, 16 March 2010, BCD 24445:127. The town took 13,600 square feet of Marion Eckhardt’s land (then
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 437 HARWICH ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
BRE.480
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.
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018)
View from SW.
Marion McClintock) for a realignment of Tubman Road in 1967; see “Plan of Tubman Road in Brewster, Mass. as Laid Out by the Board of
Selectmen,” 17 January 1967, BCP 210:105.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 437 HARWICH ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 4
BRE.480
View from NE.
View of outbuildings from west.