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HomeMy Public PortalAboutLongPondRd_1831 (1)Follow 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 SW. Locus Map (north at top) Source: Mass GIS Oliver Parcel Viewer. Recorded by: Kathryn Grover & Neil Larson Organization: Brewster Historical Commission Date (month / year): December 2018 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 93-52-0 Harwich D BRE.224 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): South Brewster Address:1831 Long Pond Road Historic Name: Atkins-Rood House Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: 1834-41, 1947 Source:deeds, historic atlases, vital records Style/Form: Greek Revival / end house (altered) Architect/Builder: Derrick Brothers, Dennisport, contractor for 1947 renovationExterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood clapboard / wood Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: none Major Alterations (with dates): Entrance moved from W end to S side, 20th cent. Shed dormers added both sides Wings added on E end Condition:fair Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:1.534 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 1831 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 D BRE.224 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 Atkins-Rood House, built ca. 1840, is a story-and-a-half wood frame single dwelling that reputedly started out with an end house plan with its entrance on the west gable end. This entrance was moved to the south side of the house when extensive renovations were made in 1947. The 1981 MHC B Form states that this change is documented by a photograph in the Brewster Historical Society’s or a private family collection. It also states that there were no open hearths in the house, it have been built after stoves became the popular method of heating. The Greek Revival style of the design is expressed in pilasters in the corners, a tall frieze along the eave line and raking roof edges decorated with robust molded cornices with short returns at the base. Currently the street-facing west end contains four windows separated into two groups by a wide blind space in the center; one of these groupings is in the position of the entrance that was moved, complete with trabeated architrave, to the center of the south side where it is flanked by three windows on the west side and two windows and a bumped-out sun room on the east side. Evidently, the long plan of the house incorporates the main portion of the house and a rear kitchen wing, although any expected differentiation between the sections are obscured by renovations. Shed dormers were raised on both sides of the front section of the house, raising the ridgeline, to create full-height rooms in the upper story. A garage has been attached to the extreme east end further extending the length of the house. The house is situated amid a large lawn and overlooks Cahoon Pond to the south. This picturesque setting is an obvious reason for the change in the orientation of the house. Like most of the properties in the area, the property is screened from the road and neighbors by thick foliage. A driveway enters the property south of the house and wraps around the house to a parking area on the east side before returning to the street along the north lot line. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: In mid-September 1841, just weeks after the death of his wife Irena, Enoch E. Crosby sold for $565 a parcel of 15.5 acres he had bought seven years earlier from John Doane of Orleans for $55.1 The great difference in price for the property between 1834 and 1841 suggests that a house had been built between those years. The son of Daniel and Thankful Crosby, Enoch E. Crosby had married Irene Jyrelds of Harwich in 1836, and it seems likely that the house was built for the couple about that time (though it is unclear from the 1840 census whether they then lived in it). In 1845 Crosby married again, to Mrs. Susan Rogers of Harwich, and two years later they had moved to Chatham. In that year (1847) Crosby sold the Brewster property with a house on it to Prince Atkins, whose family owned it for nearly half a century. Born in Chatham about 1815, Prince Atkins was a mariner, and he was at sea when the federal census taker came to his Long Pond Road house in 1850. His wife Betsey was the daughter of Percy and Cynthia Nickerson of Harwich, and their three children—Prince A., Joseph W., and John H.—were all born in Harwich between 1842 and 1846. (Until another residence for Atkins is known, these birth dates raise the possibility that he was renting the house from Crosby during this time.) The 1858 Barnstable County atlas attaches his name to the Long Pond Road house, and the 1860 census credits Atkins with $700 in real 1 John Doane, Orleans, to Enoch E. Crosby, 7 January 1834, BCD 13:143; Enoch E Crosby to Chatham, to Prince Atkins, Brewster, 8 May 1847, BCD 42:48. Crosby was a well-known traveling salesman of “small ware” and spent most of the rest of his life in Chatham, though toward the end of his life he seemed to live at different times in either Chatham or his native Brewster. See “Chatham,” Barnstable Patriot, 21 April 1891, 4: “Mr. Enoch E. Crosby, who has been a travelling merchant in this and the neighboring towns for the last 40 years and more, has changed his place of residence to Brewster. Mr. Crosby’s customers, who did not know of his departure, are very much concerned as to his condition and whereabouts. The infirmities of almost four score years are creeping on him and most likely he will be obliged to haul up permanently. Mr. Crosby was a man that never made a great racket in the world and yet there are few men who will be more missed, as he has been constantly on the road or crossing the fields with his little stock of goods to accommodate his customers, at stated periods, with pins, needles and many other little knick nacks, such as everybody wants. He was very industrious in his life of business and was at it in all weather, early and late, until the infirmities of age prevented. . . . Away back in earlier days he carried the mail between Yarmouth and Provincetown, between Yarmouth and Orleans with a span of white horses, of which he delights to speak, and at times below Orleans on horseback.” INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1831 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 D BRE.224 property. By then son John had died of scarlet fever, and the couple had two other children, Victoria and Thomas; in 1861 another son, also named John H., had been added to the family. In mid-February 1883 Prince Atkins died after ingesting a liquid composed mostly of the plant aconite and meant only for external use.2 His wife Betsey died of “nervous prostration” about 18 months later. In July 1891 the Atkins children sold their parents’ homestead to Joseph Rood for $300, and the Rood family owned the property for more than 100 years.3 Joseph Rood was born in Nova Scotia in 1827 or 1828 and emigrated to Boston in 1867. He was working as a carpenter in Quincy in 1874 when he married Susan Millard Mayo, also from Nova Scotia; both had been married before. The 1880 Boston census shows the couple in a household with daughter Lucretia, a cloak finisher, and son Albert, both born in Nova Scotia. The 1900 Brewster census clearly shows the Roods in this part of town. By then Joseph Rood was a farm worker, and the couple shared the 1831 Long Pond Road house with 52-year-old domestic servant Eliza Wixon. By 1910 Susan Rood was taking boarders at the house, and at that time eight persons lived there—Joseph and Susan Rood, their son Albert, a laborer, and his wife Mary O. Davis, a native of Newfoundland; their two young children, and two boarders, one of them Percy Nickerson, the widowed father of former occupant Betsey Nickerson Atkins. In 1915 Susan Rood died of influenza, and Joseph Rood died of heart disease the next year. His will, written in 1912, had left everything to his wife, and, in the event she died before him, to their son Albert and his wife Mary. The 1920 census lists Albert Rood is the house with his wife and their three children, Marion Estelle, Florence Jeanette, and Albert Joseph. The family lived in both Lynn, where Rood worked for the General Electric Company, and Brewster: Marion and Albert, born in March 1907 and April 1914 respectively, were born in Lynn, while Florence was born in Brewster in November 1909. The 1929 Cape Cod directory lists Albert Rood and his wife in a house “off” the South Brewster Road (Long Pond Road), but by 1930 the family moved to Harwich and appear to have rented the property. In 1974 Mary O. Rood sold 1831 Long Pond Road to her married daughters, Estelle Gillespie and Florence J. Pruett. Estelle Gillespie remained at 1831 Long Pond Road until 1999, when she divided the property and sold the house and 1.534 acres to Paul Michael and Michelle Lynn DeSilva of South Orleans. The DeSilvas owned 1831 Long Pond Road in 2018.4 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. 2 “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 27 February 1883, 3, notes that Atkins died “in consequence of taking by mistake a medicine that was prepared for outward application but was a deadly poison if taken inwardly.” He had been prescribed the medication to treat facial pain, and the bottle label stipulated that it was for external use. However, some days earlier when Atkins’s son Prince Jr. had visited and complained of a similar pain, Betsey Atkins poured some of the lotion into an unmarked bottle and put it on window sill for her son to take home. But Prince Jr. forgot the bottle, and when his father noticed it later he mistook it for another medicine and drank it. He died before a doctor could reach him. See also “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 20 February 1883, 3. 3 Prince A. Atkins, Joseph N. Atkins, and John H. Atkins, all Harwich, to Joseph Rood, 3 July 1891, BCD 191:497. 4 Mary O. Rood to Estelle Gillespie and Florence J. Pruett, 27 October 1974, BCD 681:400; Estelle Gillespie, 1831 Long Pond Road, to Paul Michael and Michelle Lynn DeSilva, South Orleans, 21 January 1999, BCD 12030:77.See also “Plan of Division of Land in Brewster, Mass. as Prepared for Estelle Gillespie,” 21 May 1984, BCP 385:21. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1831 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 D BRE.224 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View from SE.