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Home My Public Portal AboutMainSt_3668Follow 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 NE. 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 126-85 Harwich BRE.467 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): East Brewster Address:3668 Main Street Historic Name: George E. & Rachel L. Lee House Uses:Present: commercial Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1877; 1929 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: indeterminate Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone, concrete Wall/Trim: wood shingles Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: none Major Alterations (with dates): Wings added, late 20th century Window sash replaced Condition:fair Moved: no yes Date: Acreage: 1.57 acres 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 3668 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.467 Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. If checked, you must attach a completed National Register Criteria Statement form. ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION: A one-story wood frame dwelling with a front-gable roof and a cross-gable wing on the west side, built ca. 1877, is at the core of this rambling, mixed-use building. The front façade facing the highway has been altered with the removal of windows on the first floor of the front-gable section and a one-story, flat-roof addition in front of the cross-wing. A one-story, gable roof restaurant was attached to the west side of the house in 1929. Its original entrance appears to have been on the street end, which contains a center entrance flanked by windows; a continuous string of windows runs along the west side wall. The current entrance is in extensions added to the south side of the restaurant wing. A one-story, gable roof annex is connected to the east side of the expanded restaurant, apparently for staff housing. The building occupies the northeast corner of its rectangular lot set back from the highway behind a shallow lawn. The west and south sides of the parcel are paved for parking. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The oldest portion of this house was built for farmer and cranberry grower George E. Lee on land he had acquired from Nathan Crosby on the south side of Main Street in 1877.1 Lee was a son of William M. Lee (1813-95), whose homestead was on the south side of Main Street closer to the Orleans town line. George E. Lee (1850-1910) and his wife Rachel Annie Long Lee (1849-1923) operated the farm until 1910 then they moved to Boston to run a lodging house in the Jamaica Plain section. Rachel did housekeeping at the lodging house, which then included eight lodgers and three of the adult Lee children—Ernest, who worked in a “pork market,” Frank, who worked in a butter and egg market, and Clara, a restaurant waitress. George E. Lee died in Boston in May 1910, and by 1920 his widow had returned to the East Brewster homestead to live with her then- unmarried son George H. Lee. She died in Brewster in 1923, and her eldest son Maurice N. Lee inherited the farm Born in 1877 in Brewster, Maurice N. Lee was working as a laborer in 1901 when he married Ethel B. O’Neill, a native of St. John, New Brunswick, who had come to the United States between 1898 and 1900. By 1910 the census listed him as a laborer doing odd jobs, and in 1918 he was picking cranberries for Gilbert E. Ellis of East Brewster. In 1920 he had turned to farming on his own land, but by 1929 he had opened Lee’s Sea Grill in a building next to his Main Street home; he is shown as a restaurant owner in the 1930 census, and his wife Ethel cooked there.2 The growth in tourist automobile traffic to Cape Cod must have impelled this career switch. In 1945, Maurice Nelson Lee and his wife Ethel sold six acres with its buildings on the west side of his Main Street homestead lot to June Nash Doyle and her father Robert E. Nash. In 1940 June Nash Doyle was a restaurant waitress living on State Road in Brewster, and she may have worked at Lee’s Sea Grill. Born in 1916, probably in Brockton, June Meredith Nash was the daughter of shoe factory clerk Robert Edmond Nash and his wife Adelia Avis Eldridge, whose father George F. Eldridge was a native of Orleans; Avis Nash, her daughter June, and her son Robert were frequent summer guests at the East Dennis home of Avis’s brother William Eldredge in the late 1920s. In 1936 she married John Dempsey Doyle, a Brewster native and son of farmer Joseph L. Doyle and his wife Mary Brennan. John Doyle was a truck driver in 1940 when the census shows him and his wife in a State Road household.3 June Doyle and her father owned the Main Street property until 1955, when they sold it to John E. and Grace B. Ellis of Wellesley Hills, who sold the property five years later to Ralph W. Perreault of Orleans.4 The Perreault family owned it until 1972. 1 Maurice N. and Ethel B. Lee to June N. Doyle and Robert E. Nash, 23 April 1945, BCD 626:394; Nathan Crosby to George E. Lee, 21 May 1877, BCD 129:157. Lee was awarded a bronze medal from the Massachusetts Humane Society in 1912 for saving the aged Peter D. Cottell from drowning; see “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 30 September 1912, 4, and “Brief Locals,” ibid., 9 December 1912, 2. 2 A postcard view of Lee’s Sea Grill appears in Brewster Historical Society, Images of America: Brewster (Charleston SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2002), 92. It may have operated in the “commodious shed” Lee had built on his property in 1914; see “East Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 7 December 1914, 4. 3 In 1955 John and June Nash Doyle acquired the Starfish cottage colony in Eastham; she owned the cottages with her second husband Everett E. Smith until 1976. Avis Nash’s trips to East Dennis are reported in the Hyannis Patriot, 7 July, 18 August, and 22 September 1927 and 22 August 1929. 4 June N. Doyle and Robert E. Nash to John E. and Grace B. Ellis, Wellesley Hills, 16 May 1955, BCD 908:48; John E. and Grace B. Ellis, Fairfield CT formerly Wellesley Hills, to Ralph W. Perreault, Orleans, 9 April 1960, BCD 1083:45. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3668 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.467 Beatrice Perreault Ferreira subdivided the property in 1971 and sold a 1.37-acre parcel with the house and restaurant to Arthur G. Marino and Samuel P. Lauro. Lauro, born in Natick in 1916 and a resident of South Chatham, opened Laurino’s Cape Cod Village there in 1973, and he became sole owner of the property in 1976. The establishment has carried the Laurino’s name ever since. Samuel P. Lauro died in 1989, and property appears to have been sold out of the family in 1996. Jeffrey M. Drown, as trustee of Blonde Dog Realty Trust, owned the property in 2001.5 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 Beatrice M. (Perreault) Ferreira, Eastham, to Arthur G. Marino and Samuel P. Lauro, 22 November 1972, BCD 1769:26; Arthur G. Marino, Harwich, and Samuel P. Lauro, South Chatham, to Samuel P. Lauro, 17 September 1976, BCD 2402:153; Jeanne M. Lascha-Ryan, Brewster, and George E. Mason, Huntington Beach CA, executors estate Paul F. Lauro, to Paul H. Daley, trustee 3668 Nominee Trust, 18 October 1996, BCD 10446:279; Paul H. Daley, 3668 Nominee Trust, to Jeffrey M. and Donna M. Drown, 30 June 2000, BCD 13107:124; Jeffrey M. and Donna M. Drown, trustees 1186 Realty Trust, to Jeffrey M. Drown, trustee Blonde Dog Realty Trust, 21 December 2001, BCD 14618:238. See also “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass. made for Beatrice Ferreira,” November 1971, BCP 251:3. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3668 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.467 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View from NW. View from west. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3668 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 BRE.467 View from east. View from SE.