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FORM B BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
View from SW.
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
126-98 Harwich BRE.178
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
East Brewster
Address:3721 Main Street
Historic Name: Freeman S. & Deborah P. Robbins House
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1850
Source:deeds, historic atlases
Style/Form: Greek Revival
Architect/Builder: unknown
Exterior Material:
Foundation: stone
Wall/Trim: wood shingles
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Barn (attached)
Major Alterations (with dates):
Porch added west side, 1956
Annex added east side of barn, 1968
Window sash replaced
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage:4.20 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 3721 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
BRE.178
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 Freeman S. & Deborah P. Robbins House is a small story-and-a-half cross-wing farmhouse constructed ca. 1850 with a
barn connected to it by a back house. The front-gable section contains an off-center entrance with two windows on one side and
two attic windows in the gable. The front façade is decorated with corner pilasters and a trabeated entrance architrave in the
Greek Revival mode. The front of the cross-gable wing contains its own, simpler entrance flanked by windows; a pilaster on the
outside corner and frieze boards running along the eaves match those on main section. There may have been a porch across
the wings front façade. Shed dormers, front and rear, in the roof of the wing are later additions. A small barn with a saltbox
profile fronting the highway is attached to the house by a narrow connector with three windows across the front. The façade of
the barn retains only a single wagon door in the lean-to section. A shed-roof porch on the west side of the house was added in
the 20th century and enclosed with windows in 1956. A one-story addition with a front-gable roof built on the east side of the barn
in 1968 appears to be a summer rental unit.
The house is sited at the front of a square 4.20-acre parcel set back behind a shallow yard with a large yard in the rear. Most of
the property is covered with woods.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
A house in the location of 3721 Main Street appears on the 1858 Barnstable County map associated with Richard Harding, but
deeds do not seem to reach back to his ownership of this property. Harding is enumerated in Brewster censuses from 1810 to
1850, and the latter places him in this part of East Brewster. Samuel Myrick had deeded Harding 15 acres bordering his own
land on the east and extending from the north side of Main Street to Cape Cod Bay; however, Harding’s heirs sold this tract to
mariner George W. Smalley in 1854, and no deed records Smalley’s sale of this property.
Deeds clearly document that the house was owned by Freeman S. Robbins in 1861 and that it had been the homestead of
Samuel and Phebe Dill Myrick. Samuel Myrick, born in Eastham in 1786 was living in Brewster by 1810. He died in 1843 and his
wife Phebe died in April 1861, in which year Chelsea attorney Benjamin Dill, empowered by her heirs to dispose of her property,
sold Myrick’s 20-acre homestead property to Zenas C. Robbins of Harwich. Two years later Zenas deeded 25 acres with a
house and outbuildings on it to his son Freeman.1 Freeman S. Robbins was also a cranberry grower, one of more than 32
Brewster citizens then in the business but among the least profitable of these growers. By 1880 Robbins had moved to Harwich,
and he sold the house, barn, outbuildings and 14 acres to Zaccheus H. Rogers of Brewster.2 The description of abutters in this
document matches the description of the Zenas C. Robbins property in earlier deeds.
Born in Orleans, Zaccheus Rogers was a mariner who had lived in East Brewster since 1845 in a Main Street house west of this
one. He appears to have bought 3721 Main Street for his son Lorenzo Fillmore Rogers, born in Brewster in 1851. L. Fillmore
Rogers had married Lydia A. Cahoon of Harwich in 1873, and the 1880 census enumerates the couple just before the Elijah
Knowles household at 3708 Main Street (BRE.44). What became of Rogers’s first wife is unknown. In 1893 he married again, to
Sarah R. Jordan of Orleans. Tax records for 1896 credit him with a house valued at $300, a barn at $50, a 12-acre homestead
lot, a quarter-acre cranberry bog, and one horse. By 1900, however, he was no longer living with a spouse and had moved into
his father’s household, and the next year he sold his property to neighbor George E. Lee, who in turn sold it five years later to his
son Maurice Nelson Lee.3 Lee’s name is attached to the house on both the 1905 and 1910 Barnstable County maps.
1 Benjamin Dill, Chelsea, to Zenas C Robbins, Harwich, 2 September 1861, BCD 76:164; Zenas C. Robbins to Freeman S. Robbins, 16 July 1863, BCD 82:246.
In 1874 Zenas’s widow Fanny ceded her dower rights to her son Freeman and daughter Tamson W. Clark, wife of Leonard Clark, and four months later Clark
deeded her instead in her father’s homestead, here described as 12 acres, to her brother. See Fanny Robbins to Freeman S. Robbins and Tamson W. Clark,
Harwich,9 January 1874, BCD 117:401; Tamson W. Clark to Freeman S. Robbins, 18 May 1874, BCD 188:44.
2 Freeman S. Robbins, Harwich, to Zaccheus H. Rogers, 4 June 1880, BCD 143:419.
3 Fillmore L. Rogers to George E. Lee, 13 October 1901, BCD 251:503; George E. Lee to Maurice N. Lee, 12 November 1906, BCD 296:66.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3721 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
BRE.178
Born in Brewster in 1878, Maurice N. Lee was a laborer in 1903 when he married Ethel B. O’Neill, a native of St. John, New
Brunswick. The 1910 census lists him at this house with his wife and their 8-year-old daughter Alice. By 1918 Lee was picking
cranberries for East Brewster farmer and trap fisherman Gilbert E. Ellis, and he and his family may have been in this house in
1920. Four years later Lee sold it to Grace E. and Karl F. Weber, who owned it for the next decade.4 Grace Weber was the
daughter of Nathan Bassett and Grace E. Eldredge, and she had grown up in this section of East Brewster. In 1920 she married
Karl Frederick Weber, who had been working as a chauffeur for W. N. Robinson in West Yarmouth in 1918 and was a mechanic
in his native Hyannis in 1920. The 1930 census lists the couple and their 9-year-old son Nathan on Main Street; Weber was then
a caretaker at a private camp. His widow and son remained in the house until 1934, when Cape Cod Savings Bank foreclosed
on a mortgage, and by 1940 Grace and Nathan Weber had moved in with her mother, Grace Eldredge, and four of her adult
siblings. Between 1937 and 1956, when Gordon and Christine F. Brooks of Yonkers, New York, acquired the property, the
property changed hands frequently.5 Gordon Brooks remained part-owner of the property in 2018.6
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.
4 Maurice N. Lee to Karl F. and Grace E. Weber, 30 January 1924, BCD 399:554.
5 Karl F. and Grace E. Weber to Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, 24 May 1934, BCD 503:22; Hadley and Lorine H. Cole to Gordon and Christine F. Brooks,
Yonkers NY, 13 July 1956, BCD 947:46.
6 Gordon H. Brooks, 3721 Main St., to Gordon H. Brooks and Paul R. Brooks, Brooklyn NY, 10 November 2011, BC Land Court Document 1177845-1. The 3721
Main Street property is shown as Lot 1 on “Subdivision Plan of Land in Brewster,” 7 March 2011, BC Land Court Plan 39322-B. Information about alterations is
from Theresa C. Ellis, Massachusetts Historical Commission inventory form for 3721 Main, 21 March 1980.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3721 MAIN STREET
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
BRE.178
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018)
View from SE.
Aerial view from south. Source Google.com/maps.