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Home My Public Portal AboutLongPondRd_280Follow 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 NE. 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 66-108-0 Harwich D BRE.339 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): South Brewster Address:280 Long Pond Road Historic Name: George R. & Maud M. Thacher House Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: 1902-10 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: Queen Anne Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood shingles / wood Roof:wood & asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: garage Major Alterations (with dates): none Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:1.381 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 280 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 D BRE.488 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 George R. and Maud M. Thacher House, built ca. 1902, is a story-and-a-half wood frame end house with a front-gable façade containing an off-center entrance and two windows, tucked under a shed-roof porch with turned posts on the first floor and two windows in the upper story. Deep eaves along the raking edge of the gable carry a plain cornice with short returns at the base. The porch wraps around on the west side of the house and terminates at a cross-gable pavilion. A box bay window on the east side is covered by an extension of the roof with braces on the sides. The house is situated at the front of a narrow, deep lot set back from the street behind a small yard. A wood picket fence distinguishes the street frontage with a break at the east side for a driveway leading back to a hipped-roof one-car garage behind the house. A back yard gives way to woodland in the rear of the parcel. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The house at 280 Long Pond Road was built between 1902 and 1910 by George Raymond Thacher, who bought the one-acre lot on the southwest side of the road in October 1902 from Rebecca A. Snow of Cohasset.1 Thacher, born in Brewster in 1877, was the son of George Engs Thacher Jr. of Dennis and his wife Rhoda Frances Small Thacher and the grandson of master mariner George Engs Thacher Sr. of Dennis. In 1878, when George R. was barely a year old, his father died of yellow fever in Havana while on a trading voyage.2 He grew up in the Brewster home of his maternal grandparents, Nathan and Rhoda Frances Small. In 1900, Thacher was working a railway station agent when he married Maude M. Hall of Harwich. The 1910 Brewster map attaches the name “G. R. Thacher” to the house on this site, and federal census of that year lists him in a household with his wife and their two children, Frances P. and Pauline H. The same four people occupied the 280 Long Pond Road house in 1920. George R. Thacher was South Brewster’s postmaster from 1903, when his mother retired from the job, until his death in 1923, when his wife succeeded him. He also served on Brewster’s select board in 1903. In 1926 and 1928 the Thachers’ daughters deeded their interest in the property, then ten acres, to their mother. In 1931 Pauline Thacher was working as a secretary in Cambridge when she married Mahlon T. Easton, the son of Rockland physician Elwood Tracy Easton and his wife Sarah Blaisdell. Maude Hall Thacher remarried in 1941, and she was Maude M. Sears when she deeded 280 Long Pond Road and three other parcels to her son-in-law Mahlon Easton as trustee of the Maude M. Sears Realty Trust. The trust sold the property in 1969 to John David Cist, the son of Dorothea Seeberger Cist and her husband Charles F. Cist, who had acquired 255 Long Pond Road (BRE.483) across the street in 1916.3 Charles Franklin Cist (1920-2010) was a 1942 graduate of Princeton, later earned degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked as an electrical engineer for DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware.4 In 1988 Cist subdivided the Thacher property and conveyed three lots, including the third and its 280 Long Pond Road house, to his company Brewster Cannon Hill. In 2007 Cist’s firm sold Lot 3 and the 255 Long Pond Road property to Thomas R. and Patricia W. Kennedy of Orleans. The next year the Kennedys transferred the title to 280 Long Pond Road to Sears House of Brewster LLC, the owner of record in 2018.5 1 Rebecca A. Snow, Cohasset, to George R. Thacher, 21 October 1902, BCD 258:543. The purchase price was $100. 2 Captain John Hall, schooner George Shepard, Havana, to Captain George Engs Thacher, 4 May 1878, Dennis Historical Society Archive, offers an account of the death of George E. Thacher Jr., then in the crew of the schooner J. J. More. 3 Frances P. Thacher to Maude M. Thacher, 27 September 1926, BCD 463:158; Pauline H. Thacher to Maude M. Thacher, 12 December 1928, BCD 463:159; Maude M. Sears to Mahlon T. Easton, trustee Maude M. Sears Realty Trust, 5 April 1969, BCD 1433:96; Mahlon T. Easton, trustee Maude M. Sears Realty Trust (1969), to John David Cist, Wilmington DE, 4 September 1969, BCD 1449:378. 4 Cist’s 2010 obituary appears in Princeton Alumni Weekly, https://paw.princeton.edu/memorial/john-david-cist-%E2%80%9942. 5 Mahlon T. Easton, trustee Maude M. Sears Realty Trust (1969), to John David Cist, Wilmington DE, 4 September 1969, BCD 1449:378; “Subdivision Plan of Land in Brewster, Massachusetts Prepared for John David Cist,” 9 February 1988, BCP 453:35; John David Cist, INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 280 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 D BRE.488 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. Wilmington DE, to Brewster Cannon Hill LLC, Wilmington DE, 10 July 2007, BCD 22200:61; Brewster Cannon Hill LLC to Thomas R. and Patricia W. Kennedy, 27 September 2007, BCD 22426:244; Thomas R. and Patricia W. Kennedy, Orleans, to Sears House of Brewster LLC, South Harwich, 31 March 2008, BCD 22817:65. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 280 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 D BRE.488 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View from NE. View from NW.