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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.