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FORM B BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
View of #888 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): December 2018
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
86-2-0 Harwich D BRE.220
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
South Brewster
Address:888 - 892 Long Pond Road
Historic Name: Simeon & Ruth Small House
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1821
Source:deeds, historic atlases
Style/Form: Federal / Cape
Architect/Builder: unknown
Exterior Material:
Foundation: stone
Wall/Trim: wood shingles / wood
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Pettengill House (#892), 2009
Garage
Major Alterations (with dates):
none
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage: 1.27
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 888-892 LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
D BRE.220
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 Simeon and Ruth Small House, built ca. 1821 and numbered 888 Long Pond Road, is a one-story wood frame single
dwelling with a traditional center-chimney plan. Its south-facing front façade contains a central entrance flanked by two windows
on one side and a single window on the other. The roof edge is tight to the walls in the manner typical of the early 19th century.
Because of its orientation, a gable end faces the street. It contains four windows on the first story, the rearmost one appearing to
have been added, and a single attic window centered in the gable. The rear (west) façade also contains a central entrance
flanked by paired windows on one side and a small window on the other, both installed later in the house’s history.
The house is situated in the southeast corner of an irregularly shaped parcel created by the subdivision of the farm within a small
yard set back a short distance from the street and the south lot line; the back yard is cultivated with a large garden. An old
outbuilding combining shop and garage spaces is located on the north lot line. A driveway entering from the street leads to a
parking area in front of the outbuilding and continues to a contemporary house (#892) built in 2009 in the rear of the property.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
The houses at both 888-92 and 870 Long Pond Road (BRE.491) stand on land that was once part of the Simeon Small farm.
The original house on the site (#888) was built by 1824, when George Copeland sold seven acres and the buildings standing on
the parcel to Small for $320.1 No deeds have survived to document when Copeland acquired the tract, but the house might have
been on the site at the time Small married in 1821. The son of Zebedee and Mercy Small of Harwich, Simeon Small was born in
1805 and married Ruth Nickerson of Plymouth at some point after his marriage intention was recorded on 13 January 1821.
Both the 1830 and 1840 censuses list him in this neighborhood in a household of five persons—himself, his wife, and children
Simeon Jr., George H., and Rebecca, born between 1823 and 1827.
The 1850 census lists Simeon Small as a farmer with $760 in real property, and he lived then with his wife and son Simeon, a
shoemaker who married Lucy F. Nickerson of Walpole four years later. The agricultural census for that year credits Small with
45 improved and 15 unimproved acres, a horse, two dairy cows, four other cattle, a pig, and eleven sheep: he grew rye, corn,
oats, peas and peas, and potatoes and produced 33 pounds of wool, 105 pounds of butter, and six tons of hay. By 1860 the
agricultural schedules list him with 81 acres, all but six improved, and a similarly modest quantity of livestock; by then he kept
only one sheep. His property was valued at $1100 in 1870, when he and his wife lived without children in the household. By then
all three of the children had married. In 1848 George married Betsey H. Hopkins, the daughter of Freeman and Keziah Harding
Hopkins; her brother Richard H. Hopkins once owned and occupied 636 Long Pond Road.
Simeon Small died in 1876. The 1880 census shows the widow Ruth Small in the 888 Long Pond Road house with son George,
then a 55-year-old milkman, his wife Betsey, and his brother Simeon, listed as a sailor with chronic spinal trouble; Simeon’s wife
Lucy Nickerson of Walpole is not shown in the household. Three years earlier Simeon Jr. had sold his interest in their father’s
one-acre homestead lot and ten acres of woodland and cranberry swamp to his brother George, and in 1884 George’s mother
deeded him the remaining 20 acres of woodland his father had owned at the time of his death.2 Ruth Nickerson Small died in
1890.
In 1886 George H. Small sold eight acres with buildings to Malvina Richardson Putney of Woburn for $300.3 Malvina Richardson
had married Salem native and shoemaker Burrill Putney in 1871; Putney had served for nearly the entire Civil War in both New
York and Massachusetts infantry regiments. By 1887 Cape Cod newspapers began to mention the presence of the Putneys in
their Brewster house, and the 1890 veterans’ schedules make clear that they were living in Brewster. Burrill Putney was farming
1 George Copeland to Simeon Small, 4 May 1824, BCD 999012:190 (Brewster town book 1).
2 Simeon Small to George H. Small, 16 April 1877, BCD 127:429; Ruth A. Small to George H. Small, 6 May 1884, BCD 152:600.
3 George H. Small to Malvina R. Putney, Woburn, 27 September 1886, BCD 170:289. Malvina Richardson Putney’s sister, Mary Richardson
Kendall, acquired 766-804 Long Pond Road in 1890.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 888-892 LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
D BRE.220
in Brewster when he died in February 1894. Malvina Putney remained in the house until at least 1902, when she sold the house
to Herman E. Brady of Boston, and she may have remained there until she died in August 1909: the 1910 Brewster map still
shows the house with her name attached, and Brady’s daughter Marietta was reported to have been vacationing “at Mrs.
Putney’s” in September 1904.4
Herman Edgar Brady was born in Enfield, Maine, in 1854, the son of Irish immigrant farmer Robert Brady and his wife Cordelia.
In 1888 he married Alice B. Chase of Pittsfield, Maine, and in the early 1890s he was a student at Newton Theological
Seminary.5 He was pastor to churches in Maine and Massachusetts and served as the state evangelist for the Baptist church
organization in Massachusetts for two year. Brady’s last ministry was at Boston Baptist Bethel Church in the North End, where
he served for a decade until declining health forced his retirement in 1914. According to grandson Ken Pettengill, Brady had
hoped to found a boy’s camp on Long Pond Road, then known as Back Chatham Run:
He had some plans to start a boy’s camp down there and that is why he called it Ozone Place because in the 1870s
electrical machinery was new and very exciting and electrical machinery generates ozone, which is a form of oxygen
and at that time was thought to be very helpful and good for you. Actually, it’s poisonous and deadly, but they didn’t
know that at the time so he thought that would be a good name so that’s what it was called—Ozone Place.6
Brady and his wife and daughter remained in Milton until he died in June 1939 and spent summers in the old house at 892 Long
Pond Road. Alice Brady took in summer boarders, and Brady sometimes served as minister at the Brewster Baptist church when
resident ministers were vacationing or otherwise engaged. Daughter Marietta, a 1911 graduate of Wellesley College, had
married railway civil engineer George H. Pettengill by 1918, and the couple lived with their daughter Mary in Marietta’s parents’
household in 1920. The Pettengills were in their own Milton household by 1930 with four children—Mary, James H., Kenneth H.,
and George E.
The Long Pond Road property has remained in the Pettengill family since Herman Brady’s death. In 1973 the four children of
George H. and Marietta Brady Pettengill sold the property to their brother Kenneth Herman Pettengill, who served in World War
II and had by then married Emma Delano Corcoran, who served in the Korean War. They lived most of the year in Sharonville,
Ohio, north of Cincinnati, and in 1958 he was chair of American Interstate Chemical Engineers in that city.7 In 1996 they placed
the property in a family trust. Emma Delano Pettengill died in 1999 and Kenneth Pettengill in 2003; their death certificates give
their address as 892 Long Pond Road. Jean Alice Pettengill, the fourth of Kenneth and Emma Pettengill’s eight children, is the
trustee of record of Pettengill Family Trust in 2018.8
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.
4 Malvina R. Putney to Herman E. Brady, Boston, 26 May 1902, BCD 284:251.
5 Brady’s obituary in the Boston Globe, 5 June 1939, and Boston Herald, 5 June 1939, state that he graduated from the Newton seminary in
1891 and was ordained the same year, but the 1893 Newton directory shows him as a student there.
6 Ken Pettengill, interview with John Rice, 1 May 2001, Brewster Ladies’ Library Oral History Collection. Pettengill stated in this interview that
his grandfather Brady had acquire a house and “about 26 acres” in 1927, but in fact Brady bought eight acres, including the Small house, in
1902 and 15 acres reaching back to Sheep Pond from Reuben Snow in 1912 (see BCD 319:143).
7 Frank A. Pettengill, Darmstadt Germany; George E. Pettengill, Pittsfield PA; Mary L. Voegtlin, Quincy; and Kenneth H. Pettengill, Cincinnati
OH; and James H. Pettengill, Foxborough, to Kenneth H. and Emma D. Pettengill, Sharonville OH, 21 February 1973, BCD 1871:172. Ken
Pettengill stated in his 2001 interview that after the war he and his four siblings “came back and took up where we left off more or less, got
married, had kids, and so forth. And then when my mother died I bought out my brothers and sisters for the main house . . . and the rest of the
land that we have all together.”
8 Kenneth H. and Emma D. Pettengill, and Kenneth D. Pettengill, 892 Long Pond Road, to Kenneth Herman Pettengill, trustee Pettengill Family
Trust of 1996, 29 October 1996, BCD 10465:14; Nathan Pettengill, successor trustee Pettengill Family Trust, to Jean Alice Pettengill, Cranston
RI, 20 November 2003, BCD 17967:235. See “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass. as Surveyed for Kenneth H. Pettengill,” November 1972, BCP
266:15.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 888-892 LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
D BRE.220
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 of #888 from west.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 888-892 LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 4
D BRE.220
View of #892 from north. Photo from Town of Brewster Assessor Database, 2010.
Aerial view from north. The Small house (#888) is located in lower left; the Pettengill (#892) is in
the center; and the garage is on the right. Source: www.google.com/maps.