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FORM B BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
View from north
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
47-6-0 Harwich I BRE.345
NRHD (02/23/1996); LHD (05/01/1973)
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
West Brewster
Address:1284 Main Street
Historic Name: Edward & Ruhamah Snow House
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: 1866-68
Source:deeds, historic atlases
Style/Form: Greek Revival/cross-wing
Architect/Builder: unknown
Exterior Material:
Foundation: stone
Wall/Trim: wood clapboard & wood shingles/wood
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
cottages (2)
workshop
Major Alterations (with dates):
west wing altered, additional wings added
wood clapboard & shingles added
window sash replaced
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage:0.51
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 1284 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
I BRE.345
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 Edward and Ruhamah Snow House, built 1866-68, is a two-story wood frame single dwelling with a front gable roof with a
one-story hipped-roof cross wing and other additions. The two-story front façade is framed by corner pilasters and entablatures
along the gable edge with short returns at the eaves and contains two windows on each floor. The one-story cross wing, where
the entrance is located at the far end offset by two windows, appears to have been later built out to the front wall of the gabled
section and fitted with a hipped roof. A similar one-story hipped-roof wing has been added to the rear of the gabled section, and
another wing appended to the rear of the cross wing. In addition, there are two small buildings behind the house that appear to
be summer rental cottages. A third small building has a front gable roof and a wide vehicle door, which suggests that it
functioned as a workshop at an earlier time.
The house is centered on a shallow lot and is set back from the highway behind a sizable yard elevated and retained by a stone
wall along the frontage. The yard wraps around on both sides and the rear of the parcel.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
No house is shown on the site of 1284 Main Street on the 1880 map of West Brewster, but a house and other buildings are
documented in an 1872 deed from Isaiah Robbins of Attleboro to Brewster fisherman Edward Snow (1833-1910).1 In 1866
Elisha Foster sold the parcel on which the house stands to B. B. Winslow and Company, which ran a store at the triangular
junction of Main Street and Stony Brook Road by 1868; the store is shown on the 1880 map of Brewster. The company was
owned by Benjamin Freeman and Bartlett B. Winslow, whose house was just opposite the store, and in April 1868 the two sold
62 rods with buildings to Isaiah Robbins for $453. Robbins sold the tract with its “house and outbuildings” to Snow in May 1872
for $737, and his family owned the property until 1954.2
The son of mariner Moses Snow and his wife Hannah Jenkins, Edward Snow had himself gone to sea by the time he was 16
years old. When he was 23, in 1857, he married Ruhama Cahoon, the daughter of Francis and Diadama Cahoon of Brewster,
and in 1860 he was enumerated in his father-in-law’s household with his wife, daughters Anna and Mercy, and his wife’s brother
George. Snow was then a laborer, but Francis and George Cahoon were mariners. Snow was again a mariner in 1865, but he
was described a farmer in 1870, although he was still fishing: the Barnstable Patriot reported in September that year that he had
recently returned with 70 barrels of mackerel. In 1870 he and his wife were living with their daughters Anna Evelyn, Clara,
Mercy, and Elsie Nora in the home of Snow’s father Moses.
Edward Snow had moved with his family to the 1284 Main Street house certainly by 1882, as the newspaper reported him to be
in the process of building a new fence around his house. By 1884 Snow was managing the clearing of land for cranberry
cultivation, and by 1900 he was doing day labor. By then he and his wife were living in the house with two boarders. Daughter
Clara died in 1897, eldest daughter Anna Evelyn, a nurse, died in 1901, and Ruhamah Cahoon Snow died in 1909. When
Edward Snow died in October 1910, he was living with his daughter Elsie, by then a grammar school teacher.
The 1284 Main Street property passed to daughters Mercy, who had married Franklin B. Crocker in 1883, and Elsie Nora, who
had been a teacher since at least the late 1880s, when she had charge of a school in Vineyard Haven. In the 1890s she taught
in Haverhill and in 1903 in Lynn, and she was teaching in East Dennis by 1908, when she left the school and returned home to
take care of her mother. She was active in the Brewster Lyceum, the Baptist Ladies Society, the Grange, and the cooking and
1 Isaiah Robbins, Attleboro, to Edward Snow, 6 May 1872, BCD 109:248.
2 Elisha Foster to Bartlett B. Winslow and Benjamin Freeman 2d, 20 April 1866, BCD 90:530; Bartlett B. Winslow and Benjamin Freeman Jr. to
Isaiah Robbins, 6 April 1868, BCD 109:251. By 1861 Winslow ran a tin shop near this house, and in July 1866 he was building a store near it;
in 1868 Freeman sold his share of the store and its lot to Winslow, who in 1882 sold the store to Thomas D. Sears. The 1880 map shows the
store as both “B. B. Winslow Store” and “Stoves & Tin Ware T. D. Sears.” See “Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 27 July 1866, 2, and Barnstable
Patriot, 14 February 1882; see also Benjamin Freeman 2d to Bartlett B. Winslow, 13 July 1868, BCD 96:497.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1284 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
I BRE.345
horticultural events at the Barnstable Fair.3 After her parents’ death she returned to teach in East Dennis, but she soon left town
again and must have rented the homestead. By 1920 she was living in Boston and working as a State House clerk, and she was
still in that job in 1930. The newspaper noted when she came to Brewster to open her house for vacations in the late 1920s.
Whether she returned to live year-round at 1284 Main Street is not known, but she died at Cape Cod Hospital in 1951 at the age
of 84.
In 1954 the heirs of the sisters sold the property to Dorothy K. Dawson of Milton, who owned it until 1976. In September of that
year her conservator sold the property, which changed hands fairly often after that date. In 2015 Cynthia Wilson, the owner of
record in 2019, acquired 1284 Main Street from Timothy M. and Joan M. Hogan.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.
3 See, for example, Yarmouth Register, 17 March 1888, 1; 1 April 1911, 2; and 9 December 1916, 8.
4 Henry T. Crocker, Brewster; Alice S. White, Barnstable; Alice L. Snow, and Marion E. Snow, both Barnstable, to Dorothy K. Dawson, Milton,
12 January 1954, BCD 875:224; James H. Quirk, conservator Dorothy K. Dawson, to E. A. and Agnes S. Oberhuber, 15 September 1976,
BCD 2400:161; Timothy M. and Joan M. Hogan to Cynthia Wilson, 9 July 2015, BCD 29033:313.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1284 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
I BRE.345
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2019)
View from NW.
View from east.