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HomeMy Public PortalAboutMainSt_2091 (3)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 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 68-42-0 Harwich B, G, I BRE.380 NRHD (02/23/1996); LHD (05/01/1973) Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): Brewster Village Address:2091 Main Street Historic Name: James L. & Susan L. Burgess House Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1927 Source:deeds, historic atlases, newspapers Style/Form: Craftsman Architect/Builder: James L. Burgess, builder Exterior Material: Foundation: concrete block Wall/Trim: wood shingles Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: accessory building, ca. 1927 Major Alterations (with dates): exterior stairs added easterly side fenestration alteration rear wall Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:1.49 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 2091 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 B, G, I BRE.380 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 James L. and Susan L. Burgess House, built ca. 1927, is a one-story wood frame single dwelling designed in the Craftsman Bungalow style. The westerly half of the front façade containing the central entrance and a wide sash window is recessed under the broad, low gable roof. The remaining forward section contains another wide sash window. Both windows, as well as those on the first story of the westerly end of the house, have lozenge panes along the tops of the upper sashes. A wide shed dormer with five sash windows is centered in the roof in typical Bungalow fashion. A brick chimney is engaged off-center to the westerly end wall and is flanked by smaller sash windows on both levels. Another wide sash window is positioned at the rear of the wall where a cross-gable ell is attached. The easterly end contains irregular fenestration and an exterior wood stair leading to an upper- story doorway added in the center. The rear of the building has been altered with the addition of a glass slider door in the main section of the house and an arched window in the wing. A one-story, wood frame accessory building with a gable roof is located east of the house and contains a garage on the easterly end and a domestic space on the other. A garden plot west of the house appears to occupy the site of a third building. The property is located behind another house with street frontage at 2095 Main Street and is accessed by a driveway on a narrow strip of land on the westerly side of it. The driveway turns and passes in front of the subject house to terminate at the garage. The buildings occupy an open, landscaped plot; a long leg of the property extends to the north and is wooded. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The house now numbered 2091 Main Street was built shortly after Brewster house contractor James L. Burgess acquired the tract from Emma Josephine Hopkins in February 1927. Three days later Burgess filed a “plan of homestead” with Barnstable County Register of Deeds that shows the undeveloped tract behind the Hopkins property with a drive connecting it to the State Highway.1 Oddly, Cape newspapers did not report that Burgess was building a house for himself even as they amply chronicled his work for others. Born in July 1879, James L. Burgess was one of three sons of farmer James Burgess and his second wife Elizabeth M. Chadwick, a native of Nantucket. All three sons were involved in building trades. His older brother Edgbert F. (usually cited as B. F. Burgess) was a mason; younger brother Warren, born in 1887, was a carpenter and developer largely of seasonal homes in Brewster, and the three often worked together on various projects. Their father died in 1897, and in 1900 sons James and Warren and daughter Emma were living with their widowed mother Elizabeth. Later that year James married Susie L. Howes, a Nantucket native who had been working at the Consodine House. By 1905 Burgess and his wife were living at the former Thaddeus Bassett house at 77 Old North Road, and they seem to have rented numerous houses around town before building the 2091 Main Street house. James Burgess’s work was often covered in area newspapers. He did renovations on the Niles Nelson house in 1903 and 1912, reshingled the Thaddeus Ellis barn and renovated an old building on the shore into a fish house for him in 1904; he built an ice house for George Clark also in 1904. He often worked with Albert Nelson of Orleans on carpentry projects in Brewster, Dennis, and Orleans. Burgess hurt his knee in 1910 so badly that his friends feared a train ride would exacerbate the injury, so Roland Nickerson drove him to Massachusetts General Hospital for surgery, and by the fall of the same year he was back at work, building a garage for a Tubman family “summer home” and a boat in East Dennis, laying floors in Brewster’s Olmstead cottage and for Gilbert E. Ellis, installing a flag pole at the Sea Pines School.2 In 1911 he was engaged to build a house in East Brewster for J. J. McCarthy, a sufficiently substantial project that the Yarmouth Register reported on it at length: 1 Emma Josephine Hopkins to James L. Burgess, 11 February 1927, BCD 444:352; Emma Josephine Hopkins to James L. Burgess, 11 February 1927, BCD 444:352. 2 See Sandwich Observer, 14 June 1910, 3; 4 October 1910, 3; 14 February 1911, 3; 4 April 1911, 3; Yarmouth Register, 1 April 1911, 8; and Barnstable Patriot, 4 November 1912, 5; 5 May 1913, 3; and 2 June 1913, 5. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2091 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 B, G, I BRE.380 Mr James Burgess who has the contract for building Mr J. J. McCarthy’s house is making great progress with the work. Mr B. F. Burgess has charge of the mason work. The corner at the end of Linnell avenue is now the busiest place in town and the carpenters are working like beavers to have the house ready for occupancy by June 1. It is a good thing for the town when substantial dwellings like this are going up. They increase the valuation of the township and help to keep the tax rate down, not to mention the employment given to our local artisans right here at their own doors. Messrs Albert Nelson, William Cahoon and Warren Burgess are the carpenters assisting the contractors.3 The nature and extent of Burgess’s work compelled him to buy a car late in 1914. “Yes, Jimmy has a Ford, and, as he likes everybody and everybody likes him, we will all have a ride,” the Register declared. “Of course he’ll take us out; he said he would.”4 After World War I Burgess received a contract to build the Sweatt mansion and other houses on Sesuit Neck in East Dennis, and his wife and he lived over the store run by D. H. Sears in Orleans while he worked on it. Through the 1920s he built a store for his brother Warren and later added an ice cream parlor onto it; renovated the Brewster almshouse; repaired one of the town’s schoolhouses, and did the interior work needed for Maurice Lee to install a refrigerator in his house.5 He also built cottages for his brother in the mid-1920s, probably the ones just west of the Ellis Landing development off Ellis Landing Road.6 In 1920 the census shows Burgess and his wife Susie in Brewster Center in a house he owned. In 1930 he was very likely living at 2091 Main Street with his wife, but in 1933 he sold the property to Mabelle L. Perry, who owned it for almost 30 years.7 She was the second wife of Brewster carpenter Nelson F. Perry, son of Frank H. and Rebecca Bassett Perry of Brewster, and had been married three times before. Born Mabelle Lillian Cross in Boston in 1874, in 1920 she had been living in Quincy with her third husband, veterinarian Lemuel Pope Jr. and her adult children from her first marriage, and in 1930 she was living in Columbus, Ohio, with the widowed Nelson F. Perry, working as an estate gardener.8 By 1933 Perry and Mabelle, by then married, had returned to Brewster, and they are listed alone at 2091 Main Street in the 1940 census. The Perrys remained on this property until 1960, when Mabelle Perry sold the property to Gertrude Smith of Orleans, who owned it for four years before selling it to Edward J. and Sylvia S. Edmunds of Harwich. They owned 2091 Main Street for two decades. In 1999 Simon G. Bloomfield acquired 2091 Main Street, and the Bloomfield Family continued to own the property in trust in 2019.9 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.” 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. 3 “East Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 29 April 1911, 1. 4 “Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 12 December 1914, 2. 5 Yarmouth Register, 28 December 1918, 5, and 26 April 1919, 1; “Twenty-five Years Ago June 16, 1928,” ibid., 19 June 1953, 4; ibid, 14 May 1921,3; 22 April 1922, 8; 29 September 1923, 1; 5 December 1925, 7; Hyannis Patriot, 10 February 1928, 1 and 21 February 1929, 11. 6 “East Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 21 February 1925, 8: “The cottage that was recently purchased of Mrs Foster by Warren Burgess and others is being moved to the beach. Mr Fred Fulcher is doing the moving. We understand there are to be some cottages built on the land which was purchased of Mrs Foster. Mr James Burgess has the contract to build the cottages.” 7 James L. Burgess to Mabelle L. Perry, 5 May 1933, BCD 493:553. 8 In this 1930 census she is shown as Mabelle L. Pope and as Perry’s sister, which she was not. 9 Mabelle L. Perry to Gertrude A. Smith, 1 March 1960, BCD 1071:262; Gertrude A. Smith, Orleans, to Edward J. and Sylvia S. Edmunds, Harwich, 1 October 1964, 1274:51; Sylvia S. Edmunds to Leonard G. and Jackalyn J. Courchesne, 19 September 1984, BCD 4253:231; Leonard G. and Jacklayn J. Courchesne to Simon G. Bloomfield, 12 April 1999, BCD 12194:133; Simon G. Bloomfield to Simon G. and Gillian Bloomfield, 2091 Main Street, 12 March 2004, BCD 18322:295; Simon G. and Gillian Bloomfield to Simon Edward Geroge Bloomfield and Gillan DeCourcy Bloomfield, trustees Bloomfield Realty Trust, 21 December 2012, BCD 27093:248. See “Plan of Homestead in Brewster, Mass. for Mr. James Burgess,” 14 February 1927, BCP 20:11. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2091 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 B, G, I BRE.380 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 Plan of a Homestead in Brewster, Mass. For Mr. James Burgess, 1927 (BCD Plan 20:11). Burgess’s house lot is behind the Hopkins property. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2091 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 B, G, I BRE.380 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit George Boyd, 2019) View from SW. View from NE. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2091 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 B, G, I BRE.380 View from NW. View of accessory building from SE. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2091 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 6 B, G, I BRE.380 View of accessory building from NW. View of garden from east.