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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): May 2019
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
47-9-0 Harwich I BRE.341
NRHD (02/23/1996); LHD (05/01/1973)
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
West Brewster
Address:1238 Main Street
Historic Name: Clark-Rogers House
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: 1885-1900
Source:deeds, historic atlases, censuses
Style/Form: indeterminate/gable block
Architect/Builder: unknown
Exterior Material:
Foundation: stone
Wall/Trim: wood clapboards & wood shingles/wood
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
none
Major Alterations (with dates):
wings added east & west sides
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage:0.29
Setting: The house is situated in a dense residential area
characterized by summer cottages and retirement homes
built in the 19th and 20th centuries.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1238 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
I BRE.341
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 Clark-Rogers House, built 1885-1900, is a two-story wood frame single dwelling with a gable roof with wings on the sides
and rear. The main, two-story block contains an off-center entrance and two windows on the first story and only two windows at
the ends of the second story. A hipped-roof porch spans the front façade and extends across the front of a one-story, gable-roof
wing on the west side; the far west end of the porch has been enclosed with walls. A one-story gable-roof wing is engaged to the
rear (SW) corner of the wing. A one-story hipped roof wing on the east end appears to be an addition; it is blank on the front and
contains a single window in the center of the east wall. A two-story cross-gable ell is attached to the rear of the main block.
The house is situated in the northeast corner of a small lot set back from the street with lawns on all sides. A driveway enters the
northeast end of the frontage and follows the lot line to the rear of the parcel.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
This house probably was built by George Albert Clark between 1885 and 1900 on land his mother Margaret owned between
Stony Brook Road and the south side of Main Street in this West Brewster section. No house is shown on the site on the 1858
and 1880 maps of Brewster, but by 1905 a house with the name “A Rogers” attached to it had been built there, clearly on the
rear, north side of Margaret Clark’s lot. The deed to Allston Rogers does not mention buildings, but the $300 purchase price for
the half-acre suggests that a modest dwelling may have already been there.
George A. Clark was born in 1849 and was the son of Jeremiah Manter Clark and Margaret Thayer, who had married in
Charlestown in 1836. His father was a son of Isaiah and Deborah Clark of Brewster, and his uncle Isaac lived at 1217 Main
Street (BRE.340). Jeremiah M. Clark had been a farmer but in 1850 sailed to California, where he quickly grew ill; he died of
cholera on board the brig William Penn on his way home, on 5 November 1850.1 In 1862 Clark’s heirs had deeded to Margaret
Clark as guardian of their minor son George several parcels of land near the home of William Clark, the carriage house near the
house she occupied, and “all the chambers in the dwelling house of Margaret Clark.” This house, on Stony Brook Road, is
marked “Mrs. Clark” on the 1858 Brewster map.
In 1885 the widow Margret Clark and other of her late husband’s heirs sold a half-acre parcel on the south side of Main Street
and bordered by her own land on the south and west to her son George, who had married Mary E. Howes in 1874 and had three
children—Jeremiah Manter, Ezra Howes, and George Carlton—by 1880.2 George Clark had been a butcher at the time of his
marriage and a teamster by 1880, and newspapers document that he engaged in numerous other lines of work—he built and
rented ice houses and cut ice for summer people, moved buildings, and drove a meat wagon.3 The 1900 census credits him with
owning his own home and describes him as a day laborer. By then son Carlton was a fish peddler, and he and his wife had four
more children—Sada F., Horace C., Ethel M., and Perry R.—between 1884 and 1890.
In 1900 the Yarmouth Register relayed the “report” that Clark planned to move his family to South Brewster, and in 1902 he was
renting 1238 Main Street to Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Eldridge. In June 1908, Clark sold the West Brewster homestead to Alliston D.
Rogers for $300, and Rogers owned and occupied it for three decades.4 Born in Harwich in 1869, Alliston D. Rogers was the
son of stage driver Anthony Rogers, and he was a mariner in 1888 when he married Laura A. Ellis, the 17-year-old daughter of
Abiel and Lucy Ellis of Brewster. By 1900 he and his wife and their three children Lucy, Elizabeth, and Clement were renting a
house in Brewster. The 1910 census shows him as owning the 1238 Main Street property. Rogers had turned from fishing to
1 See Rev. William W. Johnson, comp., Clarke-Clark Genealogy. Records of the Descendants of Thomas Clarke, Plymouth, 1627-1697 (North
Greenfield, WI: by the compiler, 1884), 46, 93.
2 Margaret Clark and Margaret A. Snow, Brewster, and Phebe C. Chapman, Dennis, to George A. Clark, 27 March 1885, BCD 162:321.
3 See, for example, “Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 1 March 1884, 1, and 28 June 1902, 5.
4 George A. Clark to Alliston D. Rogers, 27 June 1908, BCD 289:299.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1238 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
I BRE.341
doing odd jobs, wife Laura took in laundry, daughter Lucy was a dressmaker, and Clement was a day laborer. By then Alliston
and Laura Rogers had had three more children—Laura, Vivian, and Raymond.
The 1920 census lists Rogers as a farmer, and by 1929 he had become a house painter and later a cranberry grower. In 1930
he and his wife shared the house with 65-year-old boarding farm worker Isaac D. Sears. Laura Ellis Rogers died in 1933, and in
1935 Alliston Rogers sold the property to Lucy Foster Stevens of Harwich, who owned it for less than two years.5 He died in
January 1937.
In 1942 Mabel C. Koffman (1899-1976) acquired the house, and she and her family owned it until 1982.6 She was the wife of
John Henry Koffman, and both were native New Yorkers. John H. Koffman was the son of Mamaroneck tinsmith Henry Koffman,
and he joined the Navy when he was 18 years old, early in 1918. He served at the Newport (Rhode Island) Naval Training
Station and then at the Naval Radio School in Cambridge until Armistice Day and was discharged as a radio electrician third
class. By 1920 he was a bank clerk again living in his parents’ household. He had married by 1920 and was a utility company
clerk and later treasurer, and he and his wife, son John H. Jr., and mother-in-law Alice Boltz lived in Mamaroneck at least
through 1940.
In 1980 John H. Koffman deeded 1238 Main Street to his son John and John Jr.’s wife Doris, who two years later sold the
property to the Hampton Bays, New York, firm Mitochondria Corporation, which Koffman may have owned; in any event the
company owned the West Brewster property only briefly. Nancy Ricci and her husband Lawrence F. Quigley owned the property
from 1994 to 2017, when Quigley sold it to Brandon W. Small.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.
5 Alliston D. Rogers to Lucy Foster Stevens, Harwich, 27 December 1935, BCD 515:558.
6 Amy B. Burwell, Milford CT, to Mabel C. Koffman, 17 September 1942, BCD 599:365.
7 John H. Koffman Sr. 1238 Main Street, to John H. Koffman Jr. and Doris L. Koffman, 8 October 1980, BCD 3168:174; John H. Koffman Jr.
and Doris L. Koffman to Mitochondria Corporation, 31 July 1982, BCD 3539:29 (not indexed); Mitochondria Corporation, Hampton Bays NY, to
William H. and Frances C. Brown, Hampden MA, 2 December 1983, BCD 3948:46; Gilbert T. and Shirley A. Walker, 1792 Main Street, to
Nancy Ricci, 1238 Main Street, 30 July 1994, BCD 9328:128; Lawrence F. Quigley, representative estate Nancy E. Quigley, to Brandon W.
Small, 369 Millstone Road, 26 December 2017, BCD 31083:42.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1238 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
I BRE.341
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018)
View from NW.