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HomeMy Public PortalAboutMainSt_3799Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.12/12 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 and Neil Larson Organization: Brewster Historical Commission Date (month / year): June 2018 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 126-18 Harwich BRE.164 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): East Brewster Address:3799 Main Street Historic Name: Snow-Crosby House Uses:Present: single-family residential Original: single-family residential Date of Construction: ca. 1760 Source:visual analysis, censuses, historic maps Style/Form: Colonial/center-chimney half-house Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood shingle/wood Roof:wood shingle Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: Garage (attached), ca. 2016 Guest house, late 20th century (garage ca. 2016) Major Alterations (with dates): East wing added, early 20th century West wing added, ca. 2016 Windows and exterior materials replaced, ca. 2016 Condition:fair Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:0.80 Setting: This house is situated on the north side of a bypassed section of Main Street (Rt. 6-A) in the midst of residential subdivisions created in the late 20th century. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3799 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.164 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 central section of the Snow-Crosby House, built about 1760, is a one-story wood-frame single dwelling with a center chimney and side-lobby plan. It has a three-bay front façade with an entrance on the east side offset by two windows in the front room. A one-story saltbox wing was added to the east end reputedly in the early twentieth century. A photograph taken for the 1980 Massachusetts Historical Commission building form shows the front entrance moved to the east end and replaced with a window; the entrance to the wing is also pictured on its east end with a double window occupying the front façade. A major renovation occurred about 2016 that replaced exterior materials and added both a wing on the west end of the house and a garage wing on the east end; a garage was added to the east end of a pre-existing guest house. The house is centered on a shallow lot within an open yard. A driveway enters the westerly side of the frontage on a short, bypassed section of Rt.6-A; it divides and runs to garages attached to the house and cottage. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE Physical evidence and vital records suggest that the house at 3799 Main Street was built about 1763, when Jonathan Snow Jr. married Mehitable Hopkins in Brewster. Born in 1747, Snow was the son of Jonathan and Sarah Bangs Snow of Harwich, but he married in Brewster, and he and his wife had nine children in the town between 1768 and 1784. After the death of his first wife (apparently unrecorded), Snow married Elizabeth Crosby of Brewster in July 1787. The destruction of early deeds in the 1827 Barnstable County registry fire has made it impossible to locate a deed documenting when Snow acquired the property, but his family had clearly outgrown the little house by the time of his second marriage, and he appears to have sold the property to Moses Crosby (1726/27-1811), probably his second wife’s half-brother.1 In 1806 Snow sold to Elisha Crosby a 30-acre parcel described as “all the homestead land formerly owned by Moses Crosby together with a dwelling house and a small barn on the same . . . said Moses Crosby now lives in the dwelling house.”2 It is possible that the small house had been built by Moses Crosby, who married Abigail Sparrow in Harwich in 1747, but, again, a deed documenting this purchase has not been found and may not have survived, just as any transfer of the property between Crosby and Snow has not been located. The 1790 census shows Moses Crosby with three persons in his household and Jonathan Snow (listed ten households after Crosby) with twelve in his. The 1798 federal direct tax lists Moses Crosby with a house valued at $30 and 15 acres of land, while Snow is shown with a house and an acre together assessed at $200.3 The 1800 census shows Crosby with three in his household. Moses Crosby, the son of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Sears Crosby, died in April 1811. Elisha Crosby was either a second or third cousin to Moses. By 1823 the 30-acre homestead, identified in the deed as “the homestead estate that was formerly Col. Jonathan Snow’s situate in Brewster,” had been acquired by Nehemiah Atwood, who sold it in that year to Brewster mason Aquilla Higgins for $407.4 Jonathan Snow, about whom little is known, died in 1828 and clearly lived elsewhere by the time Atwood acquired the property.5 Aquilla Higgins (1795-1869) was the son of Josiah and Abigail Higgins and the son-in-law of Nehemiah Atwood; he had married Atwood’s eldest child Sabrina (1796-1858) by 1820. The 1830 federal census shows Aquilla Higgins in this neighborhood with six in his household: he and his wife had four children—Abigail Ann, Lorenzo, Polly, and Mercy—between 1820 and 1826. Brewster assessor’s records for 1845 taxed Higgins on a house valued at $135, a barn at $36, a 12-acre homestead lot valued 1 Moses Crosby was the son of Nathaniel Crosby and his first wife Elizabeth Sears; an Elizabeth Crosby was born in 1734 to Nathaniel and his second wife, Esther Young. Elisha Crosby Sr., born in 1736, was a second cousin to Moses Crosby; Elisha’s son Captain Elisha Crosby (1772-1857) was probably the one who acquired this property from Snow. 2 Jonathan Snow to Elisha Crosby, 4 October 1806, BCD 998061:301 (Brewster town book 1). 3 Snow appears to have been one of three assessors appointed in Harwich to calculate the federal direct tax; Brewster was the north precinct of Harwich until 1803. 4 Nehemiah Atwood to Aquilla Higgins, 21 February 1823, BCD 999011:357 (Brewster town book 1). 5 Frederick Freeman, The History of Cape Cod: The Annals of Barnstable County (Boston: George C. Rand and Avery, 1858-62), 2:759, states that Jonathan Snow descended from Nicholas Snow, whose descendants “are like snow-flakes for multitude, and found in most of the Cape towns,” but Mayflower Families Fifth Generation Descendants, 1700-1800, 6:154, American Ancestors.org, states that Snow descended from the immigrant Stephen Snow and married three times—first to Mahitable Hopkins in 1763, second to Elizabeth Crosby in 1787, and third to Huldah Cobb in 1813—and had twelve children by his first and second wives. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3799 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.164 at $99, two acres of peat swamp, 8 acres of “poor land,” an orchard, two cows, three “young cattle,” and a horse. The 1850 census describes Higgins as a brick mason with $637 in real property, and his household then included his wife, their daughter Mercy, and their son Lorenzo, who was at sea at the time the census was enumerated. By 1855 Lorenzo had returned home and was farming. The 1858 Brewster map ascribes the property to A. Higgins, whose wife died that year at the age of 62. Aquilla Higgins remained in the house with various housekeepers through 1865, when he married former housekeeper and Yarmouth native Charlotte Brown Chapman; in 1869, he married a third time, to Bethia Crowle Doane of Plymouth. Oddly, Higgins is shown alone in his household in the 1870 census, and he died in November 1876.6 By 1893, again by an uncertain chain of title, David Atwood of Orleans had come into possession of the house and sold it in that year to Matilda P. Nickerson of Chicago.7 Born Matilda Pinkham Crosby in 1837 in Brewster, Matilda Nickerson was also distantly related to Moses Crosby—her grandfather Josiah Crosby was Moses’s second cousin. The daughter of Isaac and Eunice Nickerson Ryder Crosby, she had married Chatham native Samuel Mayo Nickerson in 1858, who was also related to the Crosbys: his aunt was Catherine Nickerson Crosby, the wife of Nathan Crosby. By 1860 Samuel and Matilda Nickerson had moved to Chicago, where Samuel owned and operated the distillery S. M. Nickerson and Company in partnership with his father-in-law Isaac Crosby, who boarded with the family in 1860 and had left the Cape for Chicago in 1851 with his brothers Nathan, Roland, and Theophilus. In 1863 Nickerson became the vice president of the just-founded First National Bank of Chicago and then served as its president from 1867 through July 1891; he was coaxed back into the position when his successor, Lyman J. Gage, became President William McKinley’s secretary of the treasury in 1897. Nickerson’s Barnstable Patriot obituary described him as “one of the wealthiest and most widely known financiers of the west” as well as an important art collector. He and his wife gave their entire art collection, then valued at $50,000, to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1900, and Nickerson’s will left a $50,000 bequest to the same institution. When possible, he and his wife spent summers at their East Brewster estate called “The Pines,” the home of Matilda’s parents, which stood at the corner of Main Street and Crosby Lane and was destroyed by fire in the 1980s.8 Matilda Nickerson owned 3799 Main Street for only three years, and in late 1896 she sold the property to Elsias Chase, whose family owned it until 1945.9 Born in Dennis in 1834, Chase was the son of Enoch and Duty Howland Chase and was a seaman when he married Brewster native Rebeckah Crosby in 1857; her relation if any to the earlier Crosbys at this address is unclear. The couple had four children—Ruth, born in 1864, Davis, born in 1868, Ada, born in 1871, and Matilda F., born in 1879. The Chases may have struggled financially; daughter Ruth was working in domestic service by the time she was fifteen, and Chase himself had left home for five years in the late 1870s, presumably for work. The Barnstable Patriot reported in October 1895 that Chase and his wife Rebecca “have returned from Carver where they have been cranberrying.”10 Elsias Chase died in January 1911, and his widow Rebeckah died four years later. The property passed to daughter Ada, who had married East Brewster laborer John Linnell in 1887. The 1920 census lists Linnell as a farmer in his own household and living with his wife, his brother Thomas, and four children, though it is not known whether they occupied this house or rented it for income. Assessor’s records for 1926 show John Linnell with a house valued at $350, a barn, an outbuilding, an 8-acre home lot, and two other parcels, but the 1929 directory shows John and Ada Linnell on Linnell Road, now Linnell Landing Road. Ada Chase Linnell died in 1929 and her husband in 1939, and during their ownership an ell was added on the east end of the house. At some unknown point, the East Brewster railroad freight office was moved to the parcel; it is not extant.11 In 1945 the nine children and heirs of John and Ada Linnell sold 3799 Main Street to Joline M. Archibald of Larchmont, New York.12 Archibald was a native of Pennsylvania and the wife of building contractor Francis D. Archibald and apparently used the 6 Higgins was adjudged insane at the time of his death, and the probate court appointed Charles S. Foster as his guardian, empowered to sell whatever real estate he needed to sell in order to maintain Higgins; Higgins died less than three months later. See Barnstable Patriot, 22 and 29 August 1876, 3. Higgins’s death record states that he was born in Newburyport, but no record of his birth has been found in that place. 7 David Atwood, Orleans, to Matilda P. Nickerson, Chicago IL, 25 October 1893, BCD 210:274 8 Nickerson’s resignation from the bank is reported in Daily Illinois State Journal, 2 July 1891, 1. Henry Haynie, “Cape Cod Towns and Homes,” Boston Herald, 22 August 1897, 35, provides background on the Crosbys’ move to Chicago; it also states that “excepting when they go abroad,” Samuel and Matilda Nickerson “spent all their summers at East Brewster in a lovely place called ‘The Pines.’” 9 Matilda P. Nickerson, Chicago IL, to Elsias Chase, 7 November 1896, BCD 309:35. Faythe Ellis, e-mail to Kathryn Grover, 26 April 2018, provided background on the Pines and notes that the barn on The Pines property has survived. 10 See Barnstable Patriot, 29 January 1884, 1; Barnstable Patriot, 14 October 1895, 4. 11 Teresa G. Ellis, Brewster Historical Commission, MHC inventory form for 3799 Main, 5 September 1979. 12 Arthur G. Linnell, Albert R. Linnell, Howard Linnell, Charles H. Linnell, all Brewster; Edwin S. Linnell, Ralph R. Linnell, and Catherine A. Crosby, all Orleans; William A. Linnell and E. Madeline Crowell, both Dennis, heirs of Ada E. Linnell, to Joline M. Archibald, Larchmont NY, 7 July 1945, BCD 630:142; Matilda F. Runnels, Hyannis, to Joline M. Archibald, Larchmont NY, 29 June 1945, BCD 629:593. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3799 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.164 house as a summer residence. In 1953 she remarried Lawrence B. Beals, and they owned the property until 1955, when they sold it and four other Brewster parcels to William Graham Murray and his wife Blanche M. Murray.13 The 3799 Main Street parcel was 35,000 square feet (0.80 acre) with 125 feet of frontage on the north side of Main Street. The house changed hands twice more by May 1969, when the Orleans developer Tonn, Inc., sold it to Russell B. and Ruth G. Smith of Hadley, who owned it until 1992. Its owners in 2016 were Francis P. and Debra A. Zarette of Shrewsbury.14 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 Assessor’s 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. PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) 13 Lawrence B. and Joline M. Beals, West Dennis, to William Graham Murray and Blanche M. Murray, February 1955, BCD 898:409. 14 William Graham Murray and Blanche M. Murray to John T. deCamp Jr. and Caroline T. deCamp, Springfield VA, 28 June 1962, BCD 1162:599; John T. deCamp Jr. and Caroline T. deCamp, Weston, to Tonn, Inc., 23 December 1968, BCD 1423:773; Tonn, Inc., Orleans, to Russell B. and Ruth G. Smith, Hadley, 28 May 1969, BCD 1438:950; Ruth G. Smith, Orleans, to Richard A. and Edith U. Broderick, Granby CT, 31 January 1992, BCP 7859:325; Edith U. Broderick, Yarmouthport, to Francis P. and Debra A. Zarette, Shrewsbury, 15 June 2016, BCD 29730:249. The house and barn, and in one instance a shed, are shown on “Land Survey for Joline & Francis Archibald, E. Brewster, Mass.,” April 1954, BCP 97:79; “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass. Made for John T. deCamp Jr. and Caroline T. deCamp,” April 1964, BCP 225:137; and “Plan of Land in East Brewster as made for Tonn, Inc.,” March 1969, BCP 227:71. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3799 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 BRE.164 View from SW. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3799 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 BRE.164 View of guest house from south. Aerial view from north. Screen capture from google.com/maps.