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FORM B BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
View 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): April 2019
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
56-2-0 Harwich B, G, I BRE.246
BRE.511
NRHD (02/23/1996); LHD (05/01/1973)
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
West Brewster
Address:1583 & 1589 Main Street
Historic Name: Cobb-Lincoln-Knowles House & Barn
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: 1830 (house); ca. 1850 (barn)
Source:deeds, historic atlases
Style/Form: Greek Revival
Architect/Builder: unknown
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick
Wall/Trim: wood clapboards & wood shingles/wood
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Barn (BRE.511), ca. 1850
Shed
Major Alterations (with dates):
House: additions on rear
entrance & window sash replaced
front porch removed
Barn: wings added on rear
porch, shop entrance & windows added
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage:0.58 + 0.72 = 1.30
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 1589 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
B, G, I BRE.246
BRE.511
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 Cobb-Lincoln-Knowles House and Barn, built in ca. 1831 and ca. 1850 respectively, are a significant surviving farm group in
the town. The period of the house is visibly discernible and supported by documentation; however, the construction history of the
barn is more vague, particularly without the benefit of a thorough interior inspection. A barn built at the time of the house would
be expected to be of the traditional English barn type with a roof having its ridge line parallel with the façade. The subject barn
with its gabled façade is an aisle barn type that was introduced later in New England and became popular after 1850.
The house is a two-story wood frame single dwelling with a cross-wing plan and prominent front-gable façade containing an
entrance on the east side offset by two windows on the first story with windows above each on the second. The simplicity of the
entrance surround suggests that it was once tucked under a piazza spanning the front. The most distinguishing feature is a
pedimented gable with a triangular window centered within it. The recessed two-story wing on the east side appears to have lost
a door on the first story and a porch. It has a pedimented gable and triangular light on its east end where a door has been
added. The west side of the house contains two windows in both stories, one each for principal rooms aligned front-to-back in a
conventional side-hall plan; a brick chimney is positioned in the partitions between the rooms. The exposed west wall of the main
block in front of the wing is blank corresponding with stairs in the entry hall. A brick chimney at the junction of house and wing
served the kitchen as well as a room behind the stairs. A one-story addition is appended to the rear of the kitchen wing. It has a
rooftop deck enclosed with a balustrade.
The barn has three interior aisles running front to rear that are indicated by the changing pitch of the front gable roof at the sides.
The taller center aisle contained a threshing floor accessed by wagon doors on the front and, perhaps, the rear. Side aisles had
their own smaller doors for workers and animals to enter. This barn type was adapted for various functions depending on the
demands of the local agriculture, but cows and horses were generally stabled in side aisles, unless the barn was built with a
basement. In this instance, the barn was the center of subsistence farming augmented by specialized activities such as fishing
and cranberry harvesting. The barn has been altered to contain shop and storage areas for a commercial business; the interior
has been partitioned into rooms. Barn doors were removed from the façade and replaced by a store entrance in the center aisle
and windows on the sides. A hipped-roof porch has been constructed over the entrance. Side elevations also have windows,
some or all of which may be original. Two wings on the rear appear to have been added for agricultural functions; they are
depicted on earlier site plans (see below).
The house is sited on a terrace elevated above the highway, set back behind a small yard distinguished by a mature specimen
tree and a paved walkway leading from the entrance to cast concrete stairs at the curb. A driveway enters the southwest corner
of the frontage and runs past the house to the rear yard where a small shed of recent construction is located. The barn is set
back further behind a barnyard now used for parking. Both lots extend a long distance behind the buildings. On the house side
about half is maintained in lawn and the rest is wooded. The area behind the barn is an open, unused pasture.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
The house now numbered 1583 Main Street was built by shipmaster and storekeeper Barnabas F. Cobb (1801-84), very likely
about the time of his second marriage to Polly Bangs in December 1830. Cobb’s first wife, Matilda Lincoln, died in 1828 only
three years after they married. In November 1831 Cobb took out a $940 mortgage on the 14-acre property with Warren Lincoln,
his first wife’s brother, who owned a house diagonally across Main Street from him but lived in Charlestown most of the year. By
1839 Cobb had defaulted on the mortgage, and Lincoln sold the property to his first cousin David Lincoln (1810-73) for $700.1
The 1850 census lists Lincoln as a shipmaster with $3420 in property living alone in the house. He was then a widower, his first
wife Louisa having died in 1849. In 1851 Lincoln married again, to Dennis native Clarissa P. Crowell, and the 1860 census lists
him and his second wife in this neighborhood with their young children Clara L. and Maria C. and a live-in domestic servant. The
1 Warren Lincoln to Barnabus F. Cobb, 21 November 1831, BCD 11:24 (mortgage deed); Warren Lincoln, Charlestown, to David Lincoln, 11
March 1839, BCD 37:99.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1589 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
B, G, I BRE.246
BRE.511
barn now numbered 1589 Main Street first appears on maps in 1880, but based on its form it likely was built during the period
the Lincolns owned the farm.
David Lincoln was classified as retired in the 1865 state census, and four months before he died in 1873, he sold property to
Franklin and Freeman F. Knowles.2 Eastham native Franklin Knowles (1806-79) had married Caroline Brown of Wellfleet in 1829
and was living and working as a fish dealer in Boston by 1855. Son Freeman F. (1837-1904) was born in Eastham and was
working as a carpenter from at least the age of 19. By 1860 Franklin Knowles was a provisions dealer at Suffolk Market in
Boston and remained there through at least 1872; after buying the Lincoln property in 1873 Franklin, his wife Caroline, and son
Freeman moved to Brewster. The next year son Freeman married Mary Pauline Lincoln, a daughter of Warren and Mary B.
Freeman Lincoln; Warren and prior owner David Lincoln were first cousins. Franklin Knowles died in Brewster in 1879, and the
1880 census lists the carpenter Freeman Knowles in the household with his wife Mary and his widowed mother Caroline, then
72 years old. Brewster tax records for 1890 credit Knowles with a house valued at $900, a barn at $100, a 15-acre homestead,
and three acres of cranberry bog.
The 1900 census lists Freeman Knowles and his wife Mary at the address with his wife’s married sister, Rhoda T. Lincoln Allen,
and her husband, the grocer Frank S. Allen, who had married in 1872. Freeman Knowles died in 1904, and in 1905 Cape Cod
Five Cents Savings Bank, which held a defaulted mortgage on the property, sold it at auction to the Allens’ son Ralph Waldo
Allen for $642.3 Born in Brewster in 1882, Ralph W. Allen was living in Newburyport and working as a clerk by 1903, when he
married shoe worker Elizabeth N. Littlefield of Rowley. The couple moved to Brewster after the auction and is listed in the 1910
census in this Brewster neighborhood. Allen was a farmer, and his wife is described as a boardinghouse keeper, though only
one boarder was in the household at the time with the couple, their young daughters Hazel and Rhoda, and Freeman Knowles’s
widow Mary P. Knowles, listed as doing housework for the boardinghouse; she died in Brewster in 1923. By 1920 the Allen
household included the couple, their two daughters, son Ralph W. Jr., born in 1911, and a renter. By 1930 the eldest daughters
were out of the household, and the Allens lived in the house with Ralph Jr., and youngest children Mary E., James W., and Ruth
N., all born between1920 and 1926.
In 1917 Ralph W. Allen subdivided the property into a 9-acre tract with two houses (1583 Main and the building next west of it,
identified as a school on the 1880 and 1905 Brewster maps), a barn, and outbuildings and a 3-acre parcel. In that year he
transferred both to his wife Elizabeth.4 He died in 1939, and in 1940 his widow was still on the property with children James and
Ruth. By 1949 she had sold some of the holding, and in that year she sold the house, barn, and two outbuildings on 3.52 acres
to William L. and Ruth V. Flavell of Barnstable.5 When the Flavells sold the property in 1956, 1583 and 1589 Main Street were
still on the same parcel. They were sold in 1971 to Paul F. Sullivan, who transferred the title to Leona W. Sullivan in 1977. It was
she who set off barn (1589 Main St.) on its own lot of 31,205 square feet, in 1980.6 The next year she sold the house and barn
on their separate parcels to Jill M. Hamilton. Hamilton sold the barn in 1993 to John M. and Lynn M. Hamilton, who sold it five
years later to Wayne M. Roberts, trustee of 1589 Main Street Realty Trust. The trust was the owner of record in 2019.7
2 Warren Lincoln, Charlestown, to David Lincoln, 11 March 1839, BCD 37:99; David Lincoln, Boston, to Franklin Knowles and Freeman F.
Knowles, 24 March 1873, BCD 113:446.
3 Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank to Ralph W. Allen, 26 September 1905, BCD 270:583. Franklin and Freeman Knowles had taken out a
mortgage on the property in 1878 which was assigned in 1881 to Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank. See “Mortgagee’s Sale of Real Estate,”
Boston Herald, 9 August 1905, 11.
4 Ralph W. Allen to Elizabeth L. Allen, 10 February 1917, BCD 354:188.
5 Elizabeth L. Allen to William L. and Ruth V. Flavell, Barnstable, 3 March 1949, BCD 715:178; “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass., Property of
Elizabeth L. Allen,” March 1949, BCP 86:2.
6 John F. Hauck II and Carol Jean Hauck to Paul F. Sullivan, 14 June 1971,BCD 1514:829; Paul F. Sullivan to Leona W. Sullivan, 7 September
1977, BCD 2580:183; “Plan Showing A Division of Land in Brewster, Mass., for Leona W. Sullivan,” 12 September 1980, BCP 418:52. The
1589 Main property is on Parcel 2. Another plan, “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass. Property of William L. Flavell et us,” November 1953, BCD
109:9, is essentially the same as the 1949 Allen plan but does not show the house west of 1583 Main Street.
7 Leona W. Sullivan-Eble to Jill M. Hamilton, 21 October 1981, BCD 5273:100; Jill M. Hamilton, 1583 Main Street, to Jill M. Hamilton, trustee
Jill M. Hamilton Trust, 13 July 1933, BCD 6350:39; Jill M. Hamilton, trustee Jill M. Hamilton Trust, to John M. and Lynne M. Hamilton, 1589
Main Street, 5 August 1993, BCD 8728:19; John M. and Lynne M. Hamilton, Wirtz VA, to Wayne M. Roberts, trustee 1589 Main Street Realty
Trust, 17 May 1998, BCD 11617:218.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1589 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
B, G, I BRE.246
BRE.511
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.
FIGURES
Fig.1: Plan of Allen farm following subdivision on west side in 1949.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1589 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 4
B, G, I BRE.246
BRE.511
Fig.2: The 1980 plan showing subdivision of the house and barn on separate lots.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1589 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 5
B, G, I BRE.246
BRE.511
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2019)
View from SW.
View of house from SE.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 1589 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 6
B, G, I BRE.246
BRE.511
View of barn from SE.
View of barn from SW.