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HomeMy Public PortalAboutLongPondRd_958Follow 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 east. 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 85-35-0 85-36-0 85-37-0 Harwich D BRE.222 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): South Brewster Address:958 Long Pond Road Historic Name: Seth & Chloe Maker House Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1810 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: Federal / two-thirds cape Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood shingles / wood Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: Domestic barn Garage Major Alterations (with dates): rear and side wings added in 19th & 20th centuries shed dormers added sides and rear Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:0.461 + 0.454 + 2.10 = 3.015 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 958 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 D BRE.222 Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form. ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION: As local lore would have it, dividing a traditional Cape Cod house in half would not result in two two-thirds Capes with internal brick chimneys. The story that Edward and Moses Hopkins divided a single house based on an 1835 deed citing a boundary running through the center of it does not necessarily mean that the dwelling was physically divided. There is a long tradition in New England of the ownership of multifamily dwellings being divided by deed. In any event, it appears that this house was owned by Seth Maker in 1813, 22 years before the Hopkins deed. The Seth and Chloe Maker House, built before 1813, is a one-story wood frame single dwelling that may contain portions of an earlier house at its core; further physical investigation is needed to resolve questions about its construction history. The house conforms to a two-thirds Cape Cod plan with a chimney behind an entrance lobby, a principal room on one side, and a kitchen in the rear. This plan is a smaller modification of the traditional New England center-chimney plan. With the front facade being one story without the added height of an upper-story knee wall, the house relates to a form reaching back into the 18th century, rather than forward into the early 1800s. The off-center entrance has no lights or embellishments; it is balanced by two windows on the north side. A shallow cornice along the eave line is typical, as are the roof edges being tight to the walls on the gable ends. A one-story wing attached to the north side of the rear of the house may be either original or a later addition. A later rear addition pushed the kitchen even farther back in the house. Two more wings were added to the north end and rear in the 20th century. A small 19th-century domestic barn, extended on the north side with two overhead doors added, is sited southeast of the house. Farther in that direction is a 20th-century two-car garage, which is contained in an adjoining 0.454-acre parcel (65-36). A driveway enters at the northeast corner of the property and follows the lot line north of the house to loop around the rear of the building and then turns between the two outbuildings to exit on the street. A third 0.461-acre parcel (85-35) south of the second is wooded. The 2.10-acre lot containing the house stretches to the southwest deep into a residential subdivision evidently created from the Maker farm. There are extensive lawns with mature trees shading the buildings and screening it from the road and neighbors; the rear of the house lot is wooded. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The original part of this house is reputed to be half of the house brothers and carpenters Edward Hopkins and Moses Hopkins Jr. built about 1835, the other half of which is located at 636 Long Pond Road. One local historian has asserted that the 636 Long Pond Road house was built about 1820 for Edward Hopkins and that a dispute between him and an unnamed brother forced them to cut in cape in half and move one half to what is now 958 Long Pond Road. Yet the earliest deed associated with Edward Hopkins, dated February 1835 from Lewis Howes, conveyed to him “a certain piece of land for a house lot” that was bounded on the west by land Snow had deeded the same day to Edward’s brother Moses Hopkins Jr. and then cutting north through the center of the house “lately built by said Moses and Edward.”1 Whether a house existed on the property before this move cannot be determined from maps, but deeds indicate that the property was owned by Seth Maker (1743-1824) by 1813, when he deeded seven acres and a house to his eldest son William (1792-1867), who married Deliverance Long of Harwich early the next year. In 1830 the households of William Maker and his younger brother Solomon (1794-1872), whose son Samuel owned and occupied 891 Long Pond Road, are enumerated next to each other. The order of enumeration of the 1840 census shows consecutively the households of William Maker and his mother Chloe, who is believed to have died in 1850. Though the chain of title is murky, it appears that by 1842 the 958 Long Pond Road property passed to William and Deliverance Maker’s daughter Sally (or Sarah), who in that year married Ezra Howes of Orleans.2 The 1850 census lists the Howes 1 Lewis Howes to Edward Hopkins, housewright, 13 February 1835, BCD 20:226; Lewis Howes to Joshua Clark, 13 May 1836, BCD 23:28; Thatcher Clark, Dennis, to Edward Hopkins, 1 April 1844, BCD 38:450. See also MHC building form for 958 Long Pond Road (BRE.222) by Theresa C. Ellis, 25 March 1986. 2 Ezra Howes’s death record states that he was adopted and that his mother was Mary Rogers Mulford. His relation if any to Lewis Howes is not known. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 958 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 D BRE.222 household just after that of Samuel Maker, Sally Howes’s first cousin (son of her uncle Solomon Maker); Howes, credited in the census with $300 in real property, was then at sea, and his wife is shown in the household with her son Alonzo and daughter Mary, born in 1849; her birth record lists her father as a house joiner. In 1860 the value of Howes’s real estate had risen to $800, and he was living at 958 Long Pond Road with his wife, daughter, and a 16-year-old boarder Richard Young, also a mariner,3 even as the 1858 map continued to attach Seth Maker’s name to the house. Road. Ezra Howes died in October 1863 when the foremast of the Gloucester-based schooner Benjamin Haskell broke and struck him in the head; he died of a fractured skill at a Gloucester hospital shortly afterward.4 The title search for this property can be traced back to 1867, when Francis Crosby sold the property to Charles W. Dunton of Harwich. Crosby’s daughter Betsey married William H. Maker, Sarah Maker Howe’s nephew.5 The 1870 census lists his wife Sarah in the 958 Long Pond Road house with her daughter Mary, a seamstress, and two boarding nephews, both fishermen. One of them still boarded with her in 1880 along with fisherman Richard Young and 15-year-old farm worker George Howes, whose relation to Ezra Howes, if any, is not known. The 1880 Barnstable County atlas plate for Brewster attaches the name “E. Howes” to the house on this site. Local tax records for 1890 credit the estate of Ezra Howes with a house, barn, homestead land, and both woodland and cranberry swamp but ascribes no values to any. Sarah Maker Howes died in Brewster in April 1900, and by 1910 the property was sold to Geneva Hopkins Cole, the eldest daughter of Henry Hopkins and the other, on her own or with her siblings, of much of the property along and near Long Pond Road that had long been in the Hopkins family. Cole sold 958 Long Pond to her brother Sumner H. Hopkins less than a month later. The family no doubt rented it. By 1937 the property again belonged to Cole and her sister Fannie K. Hopkins, both individually and in her role as conservator oft their sister Ruth. In May 1937 they sold this property and other tracts to their youngest sister Jennie L. Hopkins Cummings, who in September 1949 sold 958 Long Pond Road to Lester R. Gillespie.6 Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1909, Lester Reid Gillespie was a plumber, and he had married in Brewster in 1930. By 1940 he had divorced and was boarding in the Brewster home of Christine MacKay, who had come from Canada with her daughter Dorothy M. MacKay in 1909. MacKay was running a lodging house in Boston by 1910, and 11-year-old Arthur E. Daniels, born in Rhode Island, is shown as lodging there. Later censuses identify him as MacKay’s son: in 1930 he was listed as the brother of Dorothy M. MacKay Liggett, wife of steel works bookkeeper Albert L. Liggett; the three lived in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1940 Christine MacKay was living on the Chatham Road in Brewster with landscape gardener Arthur Daniels, shown there as her son, and with daughter Dorothy Liggett, a restaurant waitress. It appears that Gillespie and Dorothy MacKay Liggett married by the early 1950s. In 1954 he deeded the property to himself and his wife Margaret Dorothy Gillespie, who in 1955 sold the 958 Long Pond Road house to her brother Arthur E. Daniels. Daniels died in 1961, and Margaret Gillespie, as executor of his will, sold 958 Long Pond Road to Melvin D. and Mildred F. Moersh of Mount Vernon, New York, in October 1962.7 They subdivided the tract in 1970 and owned the property it until Mildred Moersh died. In 1990 Cape Cod Bank and Trust Company, executor and trustee of her estate, sold 958 Long Pond Road to Harvey A. and S. Gay Freeman of Sanford, Michigan. Harvey A. Freeman was the owner of record in 2018.8 3 In 1866 Young married Samuel Maker’s daughter Martha, and their daughter Cora later owned and occupied 891 Long Pond. 4 “Fatal Accident,” Barnstable Patriot, 20 October 1863, 2; “Disaster and Fatal Accident,” Cape Ann Light and Gloucester Telegraph, 17 October 1863, 2. 5 Francis Crosby to Charles W. Dunton, Harwich, 14 January 1867, BCD 102:221. Neither Crosby nor his wife Betsey are listed in registry records as grantees of Brewster land before this date, so how they came by the property is not clear. Charles Dunton was a schoolteacher in Harwich and boarded at various homes in that town; he never appears to have lived at 958 Long Pond Road. 6 Charles W. Dunton, Harwich, to Geneva M. Cole, Harwich, 28 July 1910, BCD 303:67; Geneva M. Cole to Sumner H. Hopkins, 13 August 1910, BCD 303:134; Geneva M. Cole, Harwich; Fannie K. Hopkins, individually and as conservator Ruth H. Hopkins, to Jennie L. Cummings, 7 May 1937, BCD 527:161; Jennie L. Cummings to Lester R. Gillespie, 10 September 1949, BCD 760:537. Charles Dunton was a schoolteacher in Harwich. How he came by the Brewster property cannot be determined from registry records. 7 Lester R. Gillespie to Lester R. and Margaret D. Gillespie, 3 November 1954, BCD 890:263; M. Dorothy Gillespie to Arthur E. Daniels, 13 August 1955, BCD 949:99; Margaret Dorothy Gillespie, executor will Arthur E. Daniels, to Melvin D. and Mildred F. Moersh, Mount Vernon NY, 15 October 1962, BCD 1177:475. 8 Cape Cod Bank and Trust Company, executor and trustee estate Mildred F. Moersh, to Harvey A. and S. Gay Freeman, Sanford MI, 30 August 1990, BCD 7290:345; Harvey A. Freeman, 958 Long Pond Road, and S. Gay Freeman, South Chatham, to Harvey A. Freeman, 31 January 1999, BCD 12012:189. The property is Lot 1 on “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass., as Surveyed for Melvin D. Moersh et ux. (Mildred F.),” December 1970, BCD 245:65. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 958 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 D BRE.222 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 of house from SE. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 958 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 D BRE.222 View of north wing from NE. View of rear wings from NE. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 958 LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 D BRE.222 View of barn from NE. View of garage from NE.