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HomeMy Public PortalAboutMainSt_2043Follow 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 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): May 2019 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 67-8-0 Harwich B, G, I BRE.377 NRHD (02/23/1996); LHD (05/01/1973) Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): Brewster Village Address:2043 Main Street Historic Name: Elisha Jr. & Martha Crocker House Uses:Present: multiple-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1840 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: Greek Revival/end house Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood clapboard Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: workshop, early 20th century Major Alterations (with dates): rear wing altered or added, mid-20th century window sash replaced Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:1.04 acre 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 2043 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 B, G, I BRE.377 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 Elisha Jr. and Martha Crocker House, built ca. 1840, is a story-and-a-half wood frame end house with a front gable roof designed in the Greek Revival style. Details include paneled corner pilasters, a restrained cornice decorating the raking roof edge with returns at the base, and tall friezes running along the tops of the side walls. The ground level of the front façade contains an off-center entrance in a gabled vestibule opposed by paired windows, both of which appear to be mid 20th-century alterations of what was more conventionally a three-bay façade with an entrance on one side. Three windows are evenly spaced across the upper story, and an oculus occupies the apex of the gable. Three windows on the westerly side wall are skewed to the rear to provide interior space for a staircase in the entry hall. A second entrance is located on the easterly side of the house, evidently added with a vestibule matching that on the front; it is balanced by a triple window added even more recently. Both sides of the roof contain shed dormers added in the 20th century. A two-story cross-gable wing on the westerly side of the house appears to have been either radically altered or added altogether. It contains an entrance and window at one end and paired windows at the other of its front façade; a shed dormer composes the second story. The rear wall of the wing is a full two stories with open decks at both levels and exterior stairs suggesting that the house now contains multiple dwelling units. The house is sited in the southwest corner of a very irregular lot. Large yards occupy the easterly and northerly sides. A driveway follows the westerly lot line leading deep into the parcel. A long one-story wood frame outbuilding with wood shingle siding and a hipped roof is located in the rear yard. It appears to be a 20th-century addition to the property HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: In May 1840, Brewster shoemaker Elisha Crocker (1788-1880) sold to his son and namesake a half-acre of land bounded on the south by the County Road and on all other sides by his own land.1 The son of Elisha Sr. and Sarah Snow Crocker, Elisha Crocker Jr. (1814-92) married Martha Foster in 1836, and he began his working life as a shoemaker like his father. By 1855, however, he was a tinsmith, and he had opened a stove and tin store in Brewster by 1858 and remained a tin plate worker through at least 1865. He also pursued other lines of work, as his Yarmouth Register obituary pointed out: His faculty as a mechanic was unmistakable, and he could succeed in anything he undertook. As a skillful paperer he has been employed in more than one of our towns, but he was tinman, watch-maker, repairer of jewels and carpenter. We went to him for the putting in order any machinery that we could not mend ourself, and he never failed to finding some remedy in our difficulty. . . . Mr. Crocker has filled the office of undertaker in Brewster for more than twenty years.2 Elisha Crocker Jr. was also active in several of the many reform movements that emerged before the Civil War. He was a vice president and treasurer of the Barnstable County Anti-Slavery Society, manager of the county temperance society, and a vice president of the Barnstable County Total Abstinence Society; after the war he was the local agent for the newly founded Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Crocker was a member of the abolitionist-leaning Liberty Party in the 1840s and served in the state legislature in 1876 and 1878. Like his father, he was a deacon in the local Baptist church, and he served as its Sunday School superintendent for many years.3 The 1850 census lists Elisha Crocker in this neighborhood, next to his father’s household, with his wife Martha and their children Martha F., born in 1839, and Thomas C., born in 1841. By 1855 the small family was boarding the town’s Baptist minister, Charles G. Hatch, and his wife Jane. Martha Foster Crocker died in 1857, and in 1858 Elisha Crocker Jr. married Mary Elizabeth 1 Elisha Crocker to Elisha Crocker Jr., 4 May 1840, BCD 26:178. 2 “Brewster: The Late Elisha Crocker,” Yarmouth Register, 20 February 1892, 4. 3 See Liberator, 26 April 1839, 2, and 5 November 1841, 3; Simeon L. Deyo, History of Barnstable County, Mass. (New York: H. W. Blake Co., 1890), 914; “Barnstable County Temperance Society,” Barnstable Patriot, 18 January 1859, 2; “Barnstable County Total Abstinence Society,” ibid., 22 January 1861, 3; “Massachusetts Society, P.C.A.,” Yarmouth Register, 28 June 1873, 2. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2043 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 B, G, I BRE.377 Morse, a native of Attleboro who had come to Brewster to teach at the Center School. They had six children—Mary, Elisha Walter, Louis A., Sarah, Winthrop N., and Grace E.—between 1860 and 1878. By 1870 the census described Crocker as a laborer with $1000 in real property, and he was living at 2043 Main Street with his second wife and the five of their children born by that year. A seamstress, Ella Robbins, also lived in the household. By March 1877, if not earlier, Elisha Crocker Jr. had become an undertaker as well as a dealer in caskets and coffins; his advertisement in the Yarmouth Register stated that he would also take on “all calls of paper hanging and whitening walls.”4 The 1880 Brewster village map marks the property as “Undertaker E Crocker.” Tax records for 1890 credit him with a horse, two cows, a house valued at $400, a barn at $75, a homestead property of 4.5 acres, and 32 acres in pasture, wood, and cranberry dog. He also owned a “private school house” which he had acquired in 1889; the former post office, Crocker had the building moved so that it might serve as a school.5 Elisha Crocker Jr. died in February 1892, and in December of that year his widow Mary closed the 2043 main Street house to spend the winter with her daughter Mary, who had married silversmith Edward A. Corey in 1886 and lived in Providence. She is listed alone in the Main Street house in the 1900 and 1910 census, but she continued to spend winters with her married daughters in Providence, Westboro, and Springfield, and Mary and Edward Corey were reported to be living in part of the house in 1901. Mary Elizabeth Morse Crocker died in 1914 and also received more than the usual newspaper notice at the time. ““She was a lover of the good and beautiful,” the Yarmouth Register noted; “the two jars of tulips and white narcissus on the tables of the church Sunday morning were from her garden, picked at her direction Friday evening for that purpose; and while they were being distributed—after the service—to homes of shut-ins, she was passing through the gates.”6 Three years before her death, in 1911, Mary Crocker had transferred her homestead to her son Winthrop, then living with his family in Waltham and teaching school.7 Whether he lived in the house even seasonally before 1940 is unclear. Born in 1869, Winthrop Newton Crocker married Weymouth teacher Florence E. Bates in 1896 and was living in working as superintendent of schools in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, by 1900. In 1903 he was master of John Hancock and Lincoln schools in Quincy, and by 1907 he moved his family (son Louis Winthrop was born in 1897 and daughter Myriam in 1904) to Waltham, where he was principal of South Grammar School and by 1930 of the town’s South Junior High School. The family moved to Brewster in 1939. In 1931 Winthrop petitioned the state land court to establish the boundaries of the parcel his mother deeded to him, which then extended north to Cape Cod Bay and included eighteen buildings near the shore, a dock and a boathouse, and all of Myrick’s Pond. Winthrop Crocker owned the house until 1952, when he deeded it to his son Louis W. and reserved for himself lifetime occupancy of the property. He died in 1961. Louis W. Crocker deeded the property to L. C. Crocker Corporation in 1967, which owned it until 1986; it was then transferred to Louis W. Crocker’s daughter Louise (1924-2005) and Lisa C. LaBrecque of Boston, who were at different times trustees of trusts of various names that owned the property since 1986. In 2006, after Louise Crocker’s death, Lisa C. LaBrecque transferred 2043 Main Street from the Louise Crocker Revocable Trust to the Lisa C. LaBrecque Revocable Trust, owned of the property in 2019.8 4 “100 Years Ago, March 17, 1877,” Yarmouth Register, 17 March 1977, 18. 5 “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 17 September 1889, 3. The article states that the building was “to be removed to the road that runs from the B. F. Fessenden house to the railroad” and that a Mr, Sanborn would “take possession of it.” 6 “Brewster: Death of Mrs Crocker,” Yarmouth Register, 6 June 1914, 4. 7 Mary Elizabeth Crocker to Winthrop N. Crocker, Waltham, 18 January 1911, BCD 310:192. 8 Commonwealth of Massachusetts Land Court in re: petition 13115 of Winthrop N. Crocker, Waltham, 4 September 1931, Certificate of Title 2727; Winthrop Crocker to Louis W. Crocker, 29 March 1952, Certificate of Title 13655; Louis W. Crocker to L. C. Crocker Corporation, 28 February 1967, Certificate of Title 40203; L. C. Crocker Corporation to Louise Crocker, Crocker Lane, and Lisa C. LaBrecque, Boston, 30 December 1986, Certificate of Title 109519; Lisa C. LaBrecque, trustee Louise Crocker Revocable Trust, to Lisa C. LeBreque, trustee Lisa C. LaBreque Revocable Trust, Boston, 16 March 2006, Certificate of Title 179609. The property includes a parcel of registered land and another that is not registered, the latter shown on “Plan of Land in Brewster, MA as Prepared for Louise Crocker,” 12 February 2002, BCP 571:64. See also “Plan of Land in Brewster,” 24 September 1928, Land Court Plan 13115-A. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2043 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 B, G, I BRE.377 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 Land Court Plan 13115-A showing the house and outbuildings at lower left on a small part of the larger Elisha Crocker Jr. parcel. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2043 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 B, G, I BRE.377 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2019) View from SW. View from NE. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2043 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 B, G, I BRE.377 View of outbuilding from east.