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HomeMy Public PortalAboutMainSt_2026 (1)Follow 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 nw. 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 67-90-0 Harwich B, G, I BRE.375 NRHD (02/23/1996); LHD (05/01/1973) Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): Brewster Village Address:2026 Main Street Historic Name: New England Telephone & Telegraph Company Exchange Office Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: telephone company office Date of Construction: ca. 1928 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: Craftsman/four square Architect/Builder: G. W. Foster, builder Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood shingles Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: shed dry-laid stone wall Major Alterations (with dates): entry walled in deck and stairs added easterly side, 2018 Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:0.34 Setting: The building is in the midst of Brewster Village, which is largely residential but with religious, civic, and commercial properties mixed in and ranging in date from the early 19th century to the mid-20th century. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2026 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 B, G, I BRE.375 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 New England Telephone and Telegraph Exchange Office, built ca. 1928, is a one-story wood frame mixed-use building with a hipped roof designed in the Craftsman style and combining a telephone exchange with a dwelling. The front façade contains a center entrance within an enclosed porch with a pedimented gable roof. Apparently, when the porch was enclosed the exterior door and window sidelights were moved to the front of the porch. The entrance porch has two windows on the sides and is further flanked by single windows in the front wall of the building. The easterly side wall has an entrance flanked by windows positioned towards the front; a new set of stairs and a deck have been recently added. A single window is located at the rear end of the basement level where it is exposed at grade. The westerly side wall contains two paired windows as well as smaller windows in exposed parts of the basement. The rear façade contains windows in a variety of sizes and placements; a door with a hood enters the basement at grade. The hipped roof has shallow eaves surmounting tall frieze boards. The building is situated in the northwest corner of a small lot with a wide frontage and shallow setbacks on the northerly and westerly sides; a stone wall has been added to the small front space. A driveway enters the property in the center of the frontages and declines to a parking area where a small wood frame shed with a hipped roof and a pair of swing doors is located in the southeast corner. The easterly property line has trees to screen out the neighbor. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: In late December 1927, after an appeal from Brewster “telephone users . . . for a better service at a more reasonable rate,” New England Telephone and Telegraph Company authorized $25,793 for cables, wire, poles, and a new central telephone office for Brewster. To that point Brewster households with telephones used the telephone exchanges in either Orleans or Dennis and had to pay a mileage charge that evidently made the cost of telephone usage excessive in consumers’ view. The company announced that the new Brewster exchange would offer the same types of service offered in Dennis and Wellfleet—that being ”1 party business and residence, 4 party business, 4 party residence and 15 or more party residence and business. The 15 party line will be provided for those of the town who are outside the base-rate area and who do not want a better grade of service,” the company explained. “For a better grade of service outside the base-rate area there will be a mileage charge, but even with this charge added the rate will not amount to as much as is now being paid for the same service from the Orleans Exchange.”1 Though some residents felt the local telephone exchange should be in the same building as the post office—that is, the H. T. Crocker store—New England Telephone and Telegraph determined that a purpose-built structure was the best course.2 In 1928 Clara F. Consodine, widow of Thomas F. Consodine and proprietor of the Consodine House hotel (BRE.74), sold her husband’s blacksmith shop at 2026 Main Street to Walter L. Conwell of Provincetown, who had earlier signed an agreement to lease the property to the telephone company for ten years at $504 a year.3 The building was to feature an operator’s room front and center with living space for the operator around it in a square plan (see below). In late March the Yarmouth Register reported that local builder George W. Foster was then building several houses, “among them being the building where the new telephone exchange is to be located.”4 An article in the same newspaper described the work to be done outside the new building: The outside work includes the placing of 19,531 feet of aerial cable containing from 102 to 204 wires, 5,247 feet of aerial cable containing 102 wires, 150 feet of underground cable containing 606 wires, 10.527 pounds of iron 1 “New Phone Office for Brewster,” Hyannis Patriot, 29 December 1927, 6; “’Brewster Exchange,’” ibid.,19 January 1928, 10. 2 “Telephone Exchange for Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 28 January 1928, 5. According to this article the post office department had already suggested consolidating the offices to New England Telephone, and an “informal meeting of voters and representatives of the telephone company” was to discuss the issue at Town Hall the coming Saturday. 3 Clara F. Consodine to Walter L. Conwell, 24 February 1928, BCD 459:587; Indenture, Walter L Conwell and New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, 13 February 1928, BCD 450:592. See “Proposed Agency Office of N.E.T.&T. Co Brewster, Mass. W. L. Conwell— Owner,” 20 April 1928, BCP 36:7, which shows the proposed floor plan of the building. Conwell was born in Provincetown in 1871. 4 “East Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 31 March 1928, 7. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2026 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 B, G, I BRE.375 wire, 8,100 feet of paired wire, 200 feet of multiple tile duct and 28 cedar poles. The work also includes the purchase of one-half interest in about 125 chestnut poles from the Cape & Vineyard Electric Light company. There will be removed four chestnut poles 25 feet in length, one chestnut pole 35 feet in length, 323 cross-arms containing six pins, 10,889 pounds of iron wire and 9,300 feet of paired wire.5 The telephone company estimated that 225 subscribers in Brewster would connect to the new central office, but when it opened for business in the afternoon of Saturday, 16 June 1928, about 150 subscribers were served by the office. The office was placed in charge of Bertha M. Johnson, the company’s former chief operator in Stoughton and the wife of shoe shop operative Alfred H. Johnson. The 1930 census lists them in rented quarters in Brewster, no doubt in the telephone exchange building. When the Johnsons could not be in Brewster, Alice Chase of the Orleans telephone exchange took their place. Newspaper briefs and the 1930 census indicate that six local people, all unmarried, worked at the exchange at some point between 1928 and 1930—Pearl Clark, Ida G. Walker, Blanche A. Ellis, Miriam Bragg, and Leon A. Clark, a 17-year-old living with his uncle Milford Ellis in 1930. Blanche Ellis’s mother Luella also seems to have worked at the exchange from time to time in these years. Between 1935 and 1940 the Johnsons were replaced by George L. Tinkham, who had run the exchange in Rochester, Massachusetts, in the early 1930s. His wife Mary was a telephone operator in Rochester, and by 1940 their 20-year-old daughter Priscilla was an operator in Brewster. Olive M. Baker, the 20-year-old daughter of carpenter Theron Stanley Baker, was also an operator in Brewster in 1940. The telephone building replaced Zoeth Snow’s blacksmith shop, which he probably built about 1846 on land very likely owned by his father, a mariner known as Zoeth Snow Jr.; his grandfather Zoeth Snow (1866-1830) was a housewright. This branch of the Snow family owned land on both sides of the highway. The 1850 census clearly lists Snow in this neighborhood as a 24-year-old blacksmith with $872 in real property living in the home of his father Zoeth, by then a farmer with $306 in real estate. The blacksmith shop was one of four identified in Brewster village on the 1858 map. Snow was a Brewster selectman and town meeting moderator very often afterward. He was active and prominent in Republican party politics and served two years in the state legislature in the early 1870s. By 1875 he was keeping a livery stable in addition to running his blacksmith shop.6 In 1891 Zoeth Snow sold his blacksmith shop to Thomas Patrick Consodine (1868-1924).7 Born in Brewster, Consodine was the second and five children of Irish immigrants John Consodine (1841-1928) and Bridget Kearns Consodine (1839-1918). He was 22 years old when he bought the blacksmith shop, and he described himself as a wheelwright when he married Clara F. Rogers of Dennis. In 1895, Snow sold him the Joseph Nickerson house across the street at 1993 Main Street (BRE.74) and by 1909 the Consodines were operating the hotel long known as the Consodine House there, but Thomas Consodine continue to describe himself as a blacksmith in the 1900 and 1910 censuses. At least part of his work involved shoeing horses for the hotel livery and for his brother’s express and school barge business. The telephone company appears to have leased the building until the early 1950s. Walter L. Conwell died in 1946, and in November 1953 his heirs sold the 2026 Main Street property to Moses M. Frankel of Wakefield, who owned it until 1965.8 Owners in 2019, John H. and Terry A. Halvorson, acquired the property in 1980.9 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.” 5 “Phone Station for Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 3 March 1928, 2. On the building “Brewster,” Hyannis Patriot, 31 May 1928, 11, and Yarmouth Register, 12 May 1928, 4; 23 June 1928, 8; 11 August 1928, 8; 27 October 1928, 8; 13 September 1930, 8; 11 October 1930, 5; and 8 November 1930, 6. 6 “True Patriotism,” Barnstable Patriot, 26 August 1862, 2; “Brewster,” ibid., 2 March 1875, 2; “Brewster,” ibid., 16 April 1878, 2. 7 “Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 11 October 1890, 4; Zoeth Snow to Thomas P. Consodine, 23 October 1890, BCD 190:346. 8 Almira P. Lang, Sanbornville NH, and Harold C. Palmer, Exeter NH, to Moses M. Frankel, Wakefield, 4 November 1953, BCD 858:396. Another indenture between Conwell and the telephone company exists, dated 4 April 1941 (BCD 581:234). 9 Moses M. Frankel, Wakefield, to Lloyd S. and Elizabeth S. Godwin, 9 July 1965, BCD 1305:1192; Lloyd S. and Elizabeth S. Godwin, Stony Brook Road, to John H. Halvorson and Terry A. Daniels, 33 Cemetery Road, 12 February 1980; John H. and Terry A. Halvorson, 2026 Main Street, to John H. and Terry A Halvorson, 5 September 1990, BCD 7287:194. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2026 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 B, G, I BRE.375 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 Proposed Agency Office of N.E.T.&T. Co, Brewster Mass, W.L. Conwell, Owner, April 20, 1928 (BDC Plans 36:7). Note “Operating Room” in center room at bottom of plan. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2026 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 B, G, I BRE.375 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2019) View from SE. View from SW. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2026 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 B, G, I BRE.375 View from NW showing shed in background on left. View of outbuilding from NW.