Loading...
HomeMy Public PortalAboutMainSt_2671Follow 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 east Locus Map (north at top) Source: Mass GIS Oliver Parcel Viewer. Recorded by: Kathryn Grover & Neil Larson Organization: Brewster Historical Commission Date (month / year): June 2018 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 89-20-0 Harwich BRE.461 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): East Brewster Address:2671 Main Street Historic Name: The Tower House George T. Foster House Uses:Present: commercial Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1850, ca. 1892 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: indeterminate Architect/Builder: George T. Foster, builder Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood shingles Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: none Major Alterations (with dates): Window sash replaced Condition:fair Moved: no yes Date: Acreage: 0.72 Setting: The house is situated in a dense residential area characterized by summer cottages and retirement homes built in the mid-20th century. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2671 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.461 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 house appears to have originated as a one-story Cape Cod type house with a chimney either in the center or at the ends of the plan. This section at the rear of the house was extant in the 1850s, but additional research may document it as having been built at an earlier date. The form and massing of the wood frame gable-roof dwelling associates it with this iconic traditional Cape Cod house, but it has been altered to the extent that little other evidence survives on the exterior. A thorough interior inspection may reveal framing members that would place the house in a more accurate historical context. Sometime after George T. Foster acquired the property, he added a one-story cross-gable wing to the front (south) side of the existing house along with a square- plan, three-story tower with a hipped roof. The building became known locally as the Tower House. It apparently retained its essential architectural integrity until the 2000s when the building was renovated for use as a restaurant. A small wing extending west of the front wing near its intersection with the old house probably was added at this time. The house is set back from the street behind a small yard with trees, but the rest of the property on the east side of the house has been paved for a parking lot. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: In June 1892, the heirs of East Brewster farmer Godfrey Hopkins sold 30 acres with a house and outbuildings on it to George Thatcher Foster of East Brewster for $1700. Hopkins (1804-71) and his wife Reliance Mayo Hopkins had lived in a house just west since at least the 1850s; he had died in 1871, and his wife died in 1898. The 1858 map shows Hopkins with two adjacent dwellings, one of them, on the property sold to Foster. The 1890 assessors’ records taxed Hopkins’s estate for only one house, a barn, and various other small parcels.1 This house may is likely the one sold in 1892. Born in Brewster in 1860, George T. Foster was the son of Thatcher and Susan Emery Foster, and by 1880 he was working as an apprentice to wheelwright Charles C. Crocker and boarding in the Crocker household. He was described as a carpenter when he married Barnstable native Winnifred B. Phinney in 1882. In 1890 Foster owned his own and his father’s houses, barns, and homestead lots as well as a third “barn and shop” and nearly 64 more acres of pasture, tillage, woodland, meadow, and cranberry land. The 1900 census clearly places Foster in this neighborhood in a house with his wife, and their children Mary, Charlotte, and George W. He is there described as a carpenter, while the 1901 Cape Cod directory lists him as a contractor and builder and a lumber and hardware dealer on Main Street in East Brewster with his house at the same location. He would have built the front portions of the house with its tower by this time.2 The 1905 Barnstable County map attaches the name “G. T. Foster” to the building on this site, and in 1920 Foster living only with his son Charles, born about 1903. By 1913 he and Winnifred had divorced, and in that year he deeded to her part of his 30- acre tract with the buildings on it.3 The 1920 census lists ex-wife Winnifred in her own dwelling with confectionary merchant Edgar C. Foster (to whom she was a distant cousin by marriage)4 and his wife Mertis L. Baker Foster; enumerated just before her is her son George W., a house carpenter like his father. George T. Foster may have moved with his son to his father’s house by that time, though he continued to own the 2671 Main Street property. 1 Reliance Mayo Hopkins’s 1895 will left her house, homestead property, and other buildings on that parcel to her son Godfrey and daughter Louisa Knowles in equal shares. The 1890 tax records for the Godfrey Hopkins estate include a note stating “sold to David Atwood Orleans,” but this applies only to the acre of meadow for which the estate was taxed; see Godfrey Hopkins, Mallisa H. Crosby, and S. Emma Hopkins to David Atwood, 23 February 1891, BCD 196:275. 2 Faythe Ellis, e-mail to Kathryn Grover, 4 April 2018, states that family history holds that the 2671 Main Street house was the site of Foster’s saw and lumber mill, a statement confirmed by Foster’s son George W. (“Fobe”) Foster in a 1966 interview. 3 George T. Foster to Winnifred Foster, 11 December 1913, BCD 330:158; George T. Foster to Winnifred Foster, 16 February 1915, BCD 342:258 corrects the measurements of the parcel. 4 See John R. Totten, Thacher-Thatcher Genealogy (New York: New York Genealogical and Biographical Society, 1910), 258-59. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2671 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.461 In 1922 George T. Foster married again, to Adelaide E. Chapman LeFort, and in 1925 he sold the property to George C. Clark; Clark in turn sold it less than two years later to Gilbert E. Ellis.5 The son of Brewster fisherman Thaddeus Ellis, Gilbert Ellis (b.1867) was what his grandson Theodore Brooks Ellis called a “trap fisherman” who caught fish in weirs set in Cape Cod Bay. Gilbert Ellis was also active in the real estate market and developed numerous summer cottage colonies, including the one along Captain Dunbar Road near Ellis Landing. He probably rented 2671 Main Street until he died in 1944. Ellis’s January 1934 will left grandson Ted “the Tower house and lot” as well as two cottages in his Ellis Landing development and two cranberry bogs. In late 1945 Ted Ellis returned from World War II service and met Jean Allen, a schoolteacher boarding in the Main Street home of his mother Lydia Cahoon Ellis, the town librarian who took in boarders for income after Gilbert Ellis’s death. The two married in 1946, and the so-called Tower house at 2671 Main Street became their first home. “It wasn’t much of a house, but it was a house,” Ted Ellis stated in a 2001 interview. “And I owned it. So I was very grateful for that.” His wife recalled, “I remember we were in the Tower House having a meeting, and Arnold [Westwood, the Unitarian minister] was making a point about something. And the squirrels were running a race in the attic, right above, and so all of us were trying to listen to Arnold. But we were laughing, smothering our laughter. The Tower House wasn’t exactly tight. We used to have to shovel the snow out of the attic.”6 Theodore and Jean Ellis owned and occupied the house until 1955, when they sold it to John E. Duffy of Orleans, who owned the property until 1969.7 In 1997 Gary and Shirley Brothers acquired it, and in the 2000s the property was converted into a restaurant. 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. 5 George T. Foster to George C. Clark, 26 December 1925, BCD 429:149; George C. Clark to Gilbert E. Ellis, 7 April 1927, BCD 444:442. Adelaide Foster died in 1928 and George T. Foster in 1930. By 1930 Winnifred Foster had moved to the Cotuit home of her married daughter Mary Howard Foster Adao. Assessors’ records for 1926 taxed George T. Foster on only 12 acres of woodland. Son George W. Foster then owned two houses, two garages, and a “tower.” 6 Ted Ellis, interview with Chris Bladen, 2 July 2001, and Jean Ellis, interview with Chris Bladen, 24 July 2001, Brewster Ladies’ Library. Faythe Ellis provided a photocopy of the Gilbert Ellis will. 7 Theodore B. Ellis to John E. Duffy, Orleans, 8 March 1955, BCD 901:589; John E. and Nona J. Duffy to Henry A. and Lillian S. Callahan, 26 July 1969, BCD 1451:349. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 2671 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.461 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View from NE. View from SW.