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Home My Public Portal AboutHarwichRd_58 62Follow 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 SE. 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 57-33-0 Harwich BRE.210 BRE.477 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): Brewster Center Address:58-62 Harwich Road Historic Name: Freeman T. & Catherine J. Ellis Hse (BRE.210) Levasseur Automobile Repair Shop (BRE.477) Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: House: 1875-80 Shop: 1974-78 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: Gothic Revival / end house Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood shingles / wood Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: none Major Alterations (with dates): Rear additions added, 1976, 1980 Front addition added 1978 Window sash replaced Condition:fair Moved: no yes Date: Acreage: 0.27 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 58-62 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.210 BRE.477 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 Freeman T. & Catherine J. Ellis House, built 1875-80, is a story-and-a-half wood frame end house with a steep front gable roof and Gothic Revival trim along the roof edge. Originally seated on a stone foundation over a crawl space, a basement with concrete block walls was constructed under the house in 1978. The current “third-generation” owner believes the house to have been moved to the site from another location, but no documentation has been found to verify it; an intensive interior inspection would be necessary to find physical evidence of an earlier construction history. The first story of the original front façade with its entrance is obscured by a one-story bedroom addition built in 1978, the front of which contains a three-part picture window. An added brick chimney bisects the upper story of the gable and is flanked by original windows. The blank front section of the southerly side wall indicates the location of the entry hall and stair; the current entrance is located at the rear of this wall contained in a one-story gabled kitchen wing added to the rear of the house in 1976. This wing was extended by an addition with a low-pitched roof a few years later. The gable end on the rear of the house has a single window centered in the upper story. A central chimney corresponds to the partition between the two principal rooms on the north side of the house. A one-story workshop with concrete-block walls and a gable roof was constructed behind the house in 1974-78. A vehicle door is located on the south end and is accessed by a driveway running from the street along the south lot line. A small yard occupies a space between the house and the street. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The house at the front (east) part of the lot now numbered 58-62 Harwich Road does not appear on the 1858 map of Brewster, but the 1880 map shows it as belonging to “F. Ellis.” In April 1875, Helen Dugan, on behalf of the estate of Sarah Copeland, sold two acres of tillage land on the west side of Harwich Road to Freeman T. Ellis; the land ranged between the Joshua Allen house at the corner of Main Street and Brewster Road and the Lawrence Doyle homestead. The deed mentions no buildings and stipulates that Ellis was to build and maintain a fence between his and Dugan’s land to the west.1 The son of Ezra and Rosanna Ellis, Freeman Thomas Ellis was born in Brewster in 1858 and worked as a fisherman and seaman. In 1871 he married Judith R. Davis of Harwich, but three years later he married again, to Catherine J. Doyle, the daughter of Irish immigrant laborer Lawrence Doyle and his wife Elizabeth, who lived just south of this house. What happened to his first marriage, or first wife, is not yet known. By 1880 the census lists him as a sailor living here with his wife Catherine and their daughters Catherine J. (in later censuses named Josephine K.) and Elizabeth M. (later shown as Mary E.). In 1882 son Freeman Thomas Ellis Jr. was born, and by 1900 two other children had been born—Harrald, in 1886, and Teresa, in 1893. In 1894 the Hyannis Patriot noted that Ellis was in command of the Chatham schooner Flora Temple, then bound for Boston and Gloucester to fit for mackerel fishing; “quite a number of men left town” by 1 May that year to serve in the schooner’s crew.2 The 1900 census lists Freeman T. Ellis as a fisherman, and adult daughters Josephine and Mary were also in the labor force by then, Josephine as a nurse and Mary as a teacher. In 1910 Ellis was a fisherman and his wife a laundress working from her home, and they shared the house only with youngest daughter Teresa, then a 16-year-old high school student; by 1913 son Harrald was studying at normal school in Hyannis and apparently boarded there. In 1926 Freeman T. Ellis deeded the Harwich Road property to his daughter Teresa;3 son Freeman and his wife Delia Hawkins Ellis, whom he married in 1908, lived on adjacent property at the north and west and fronting on Main Street. The 1930 census lists Freeman T. Ellis, his wife Catherine, and daughters Mary and Teresa in the house. Mary was a hospital nurse, and by 1929 Teresa had opened the Ellis Shop, a dress and ladies’ wear store on Harwich Road, probably in one of the two outbuildings 1 Helen Dugan, devisee estate Sarah T. Copeland, to Freeman T. Ellis, 12 April 1875, BCD 286:534. 2 “Brewster,” Hyannis Patriot, 15 May 1894, 3, and 12 June 1894, 3. 3 Freeman T. Ellis to Teresa Ellis, 26 August 1926, BCD 424:145. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 58-62 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.210 BRE.477 shown at the rear of the house on the 1905 Brewster map. A 1931 Land Court plan shows two houses and other outbuildings on the lot.4 Freeman T. Ellis Sr. died in September 1930 at the age of 82. In 1936, according to local historian George H. Boyd III, 58-62 Harwich Road became the Brewster post office, with Freeman Jr. as its postmaster; Freeman Jr.’s son Louis served briefly as acting postmaster in 1952 and 1953.5 The Harwich Road house might have been rented in 1940, as no Ellis is shown on that road in that year’s federal census. In 1940 Freeman Jr. and his wife were living with their married daughter Anne and her husband Herbert McAnistan on Depot Street (probably Long Pond Road), and Ellis’s 1942 draft registration gives his address as Long Pond Road. In 1945 a trustee for the property deeded 58-62 Harwich Road to F. Thomas Ellis Jr. and his wife Delia, whose family owned 58-62 Harwich Road until 1964.6 Freeman T. Ellis Jr. had been a farm worker early in life, but he was postmaster of Brewster from 1936 to 1952. In 1964 Daniel Gerald and Leola Michaud Lavasseur acquired 58-62 Harwich Road from the Ellis family, and it remained in the Levasseur family through at least 2018.7 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. 4 “Plan of Land in Brewster,” 8 September 1931, BC Land Court Plan 15096-A, which shows the 58-62 Harwich Road buildings on Lot A. See also Commonwealth of Massachusetts Land Court in re petition #15096 of Teresa Ellis, Brewster, 1 May 1934, BCR Certificate of Title 3442. 5 George H. Boyd III, e-mail to Neil Larson, 19 February 2019, provided information about the post office. According to Boyd, in 1936 the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt fired then-postmaster Henry Crocker, owner of the Brewster store on Main Street, and Crocker refused to permit the store to house the post office afterward; thus the post office moved to 58-62 Harwich Road. 6 Mary E. Ellis McGran, trustee, to F. Thomas and Delia Ellis, 23 June 1945, BCR Certificate of Title 8128; F. Thomas Ellis to F. Thomas and Dora L. Ellis, 26 August 1959, BCR Certificate of Title 23853. 7 Dora L. Ellis, Boston, to Daniel G. and Leola A. Levasseur, 6 March 1964, BCR Certificate of Title 32967; Leola M. Levasseur to Gregory Levasseur, 20 May 2009, BCR Certificate of Title 188695. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 58-62 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.210 BRE.477 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View form NE. View from SW. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 58-62 HARWICH ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 BRE.210 BRE.477 View of automobile repair shop from SE.