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HomeMy Public PortalAboutMainSt_3915Follow 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 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): April 2018 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 138-4 Harwich BRE.182 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): East Brewster Address:3915 Main Street Historic Name: Adnah & Mary Rogers House Uses:Present: single-family residential Original: single-family residential Date of Construction: ca. 1850 Source:deeds, censuses, historic maps Style/Form: Greek Revival Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: stone Wall/Trim: wood shingle/ wood Roof:asphalt shingle Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: Garden shed greenhouse Major Alterations (with dates): Recessed porch reconstructed Window sash replaced Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:0.99 acre 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 3915 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.182 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 Adnah and Mary Rogers House, built about 1850, is a one-story wood frame single dwelling with a front-gable roof and late Greek Revival-style decoration along the roof edge and paneled pilasters corners and fronting a recessed porch. It has a three- bay front façade with the open end of the porch in the west corner offset by two windows. The entrance is positioned at the back of the porch on the west side of the house. The porch essentially opens up the side passage of the plan to the exterior with two rooms on the east side divided by a partition containing a chimney. The west side of the house is distinguished by a cross-gable dormer creating more space in the upper story. Front, rear, and side gables contain two windows and small arched windows at the tops. A narrow one-story kitchen ell is attached to the northwest corner of the house and has a shed extension on the rear. The house is situated on a large corner lot cultivated with commercial gardens. A driveway enters from Main Street leading to a parking area where a small office shed is located. A plastic greenhouse occupies the northwest corner of the property. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE In July 1847, Adnah Rogers Sr. of Orleans acquired 25 acres with a house, barn, and outbuildings in East Brewster from the widow and children of Solomon Freeman, who had died in Brewster in November 1820. The house had probably belonged to Freeman and his wife Abigail Clark Freeman (1769-1851), who raised nine children there. The order of enumeration of censuses from 1830 through 1865 suggest that eldest son William Freeman, born in 1794, was the head of household after 1820 and lived next door at 3873 Main Street at the time of the transaction. From 1850 through 1865 William Freeman and his family are enumerated next to Adnah Rogers Jr., to whom Adnah Sr. deeded the 25-acre property in 1853.1 It appears that Solomon Freeman’s dwelling was replaced with the extant house soon after the Rogerses took possession of the property. Born in Orleans in 1823, Adnah Rogers Jr. began his career as a harnessmaker probably in February 1846, when he announced in the Barnstable Patriot that he had taken a shop near the Orleans post office to work at that trade. In September of the same year he married Mary A. Higgins, the daughter of Aquilla and Sabrina Atwood Higgins of East Brewster, and by 1850 the couple is shown in this neighborhood. Though that year’s population schedule credits no real property to Rogers, the 1850 agricultural census makes clear that Rogers owned 27 acres, 20 of them cleared, as well as a horse, 2 dairy cows, one other cow, and a pig; as most other Brewster farmers of the day did, he produced rye, corn, oats, peas and beans, potatoes, tree fruit, hay, and a modest amount of butter. Even as he kept up the farm, censuses consistently identified Rogers as a harnessmaker. He and his wife had two daughters—Mary A., born in 1852, and Mercy W., born in 1855. Adnah Rogers’s family owned 3915 Main Street until 1902. Mary Higgins Rogers died in 1886, and three years later Adnah Rogers married a second time, to Orleans housekeeper Ruth A. Wiles Nickerson. The 1900 census lists the couple alone in their East Brewster household. Three years later the elderly couple was killed when the carriage in which they were riding was struck by an express train on its way from Provincetown to Boston, as the Boston Journal reported with an East Brewster dateline: Mr. and Mrs. Adnah Rogers, driving in a carriage near here this afternoon, were struck and instantly killed by the locomotive of the express train to Boston on the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroad. The accident occurred where a private roadway leading from the woods crosses the tracks of the Old Colony division of the consolidated system. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers apparently heard the whistle of the locomotive and tried to get safely over the tracks before the arrival of the rain. The body of the carriage was directly between the rails when the engine rushed down upon it. Mr. Rogers’ body was thrown to one side by the locomotive, as was that of the horse; but Mrs. Rogers and the vehicle were picked up by the pilot of the engine and carried till the train was brought to a standstill a hundred yards away. 1 Solomon Freeman, Elijah and Abigail Knowles, Wallace Freeman, all Brewster; Isaiah G. and Jerusha Ward, Provincetown; Henry Freeman, Salem NJ; and Thankful Dalton, Boston, to Adnah Rogers, Orleans, 28 July 1847, BCD 43:84 (Wallace probably should be William); Adnah Rogers, Orleans, to Adnah Rogers Jr., Brewster, 31 December 1853, BCD 58:45. In this second deed grantor Adnah Rogers Sr. stated that the parcel was “all that which I purchased of the widow and heirs of the estate of Solomon Freeman of Brewster” in July 1847. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3915 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.182 Before the train could proceed it was necessary to chop away parts of the carriage which had got entangled in the running gear of the locomotive. The bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Rogers were removed to their home in Brewster. Mr. Rogers was 70 years old; his wife was 60 years old. He was a harnessmaker in East Brewster.2 In July 1905 the Rogers’s daughters Mary and Mercy, both of whom then lived in Essex County, sold their parents’ homestead to Richard Studley Gage of Orleans.3 Gage, a fisherman, mariner, longtime member of the lifesaving service, and later a dispatcher on the Cape Cod Canal, owned the property for only nine years. He sold it to East Brewster grocer Herbert W. Doane, who appears to have rented the house for added income for the next 30 years. Assessor’s records for 1926 taxed Doane on three houses—one marked “Gage,” valued at $1100—as well as a garage, two barns, two henhouses, three homestead lots, “store and light,” two acres planted in asparagus, a gas tank, livestock, and several other parcels. In 1944 Doane’s widow and foster daughter sold the 3915 Main Street property to Arthur Raymond Taber, who had probably been renting the house since about 1935, when he moved to Brewster from Boston.4 Born in Brockton in 1883, Taber had sold furniture, worked as a police officer, and managed a theater in Boston, and the 1940 census shows him living in Brewster and a restaurant owner. By 1942 Taber was working as a house painter for Rudolph C. Munz in Orleans. In 1947 Taber and his wife sold 3915 Main Street to Harry B. and Helen B. Winne of New York City, who owned it for the next 21 years.5 Winne, born in Kingston, New York, in 1895, had worked earlier in his life as a sales manager and officer of a varnish factory near Boston, and he had married Helen B. Hullick in 1940. The Winnes lived in New York and Orleans and probably rented East Brewster house, and it was very likely they who built summer cottages at the rear of the property called Settle Down Cottages, one of three cottage colonies listed in the Brewster Board of Trade’s 1951 promotional brochure; the 1958 board of trade brochure identifies the Settle Downs as one of seven such colonies in town and described them as “one- and two-bedroom studios” run by H. B. Winne of Orleans.6 The cottages were sold, probably at the time the Winnes sold the whole parcel, and some were moved to other locations.7 In 1968 the Winnes sold the property to Orleans development firm Tonn, Inc., who subdivided part of the property for Sea View Estates. A decade later Tonn sold the house and its lot of nearly an acre to Christopher P. Frey, who with his wife Laurie owned the property until 2000. Lucas Dinwiddie acquired 3915 Main Street in 2016.8 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. 2 “Aged Couple Killed at Grade Crossing,” Boston Journal, 13 July 1903, 7; see also “Death at a Crossing,” Boston Herald, 13 July 1903, 9. The accident was widely reported in lesser detail in numerous newspapers. The death record of both indicates the cause of death as shock. Barnstable Patriot reported on 11 April 1904 (page 2) that the suit brought by the estate of Adnah and Ruth Rogers against the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad Company had been continued; its substance and outcome are unknown. Teresa C. Ellis, Brewster Historical Commission, MHC inventory form for 3915 Main Street, 3 March 1980, stated that the Rogerses were making their regular Sunday visit to “relative” Zacheus Rogers, who lived further west on Main Street, when the accident took place. Their precise relation has not yet been determined. 3 Mary A. Rogers, Beverly, and Mercy W. Rogers, Salem, to Richard S. Gage, Orleans, 7 July 1905, BCD 280:8. 4 Hannah M. Gage to Herbert W. Doane, 2 July 1914, BCD 327:450; Danena Doane and Gertrude Rowell to Arthur R. and Mary A. Taber, 24 July 1944, BCD 616:162. 5 Arthur R. and Mary A. Taber to Harry B. and Helen B. Winne, New York NY, 29 October 1947, 681:566. 6 Brewster Board of Trade, “The Town of Brewster Massachusetts on Cape Cod,” (pamphlet, 1951), and “The Brewster Board of Trade Invites you to Cape Cod” (brochure, n.d. but 1958 from context), Brewster History vertical files, Brewster Ladies’ Library. 7 Ellis, MHC inventory form, notes that some of the Settle Down cottages were moved to Millstone Road and made into a one-story house north of Sandpiper Lane. 8 Harry B. and Helen B. Winne, Orleans, to Tonn Inc., Orleans, 13 November 1968, BCD 1419:393. The 3915 Main Street property is two parcels, one of them unregistered land and the other registered. The boundaries of the ot were established in Commonwealth of Massachusetts Land Court in October 1976; see BC Certificate of Title 68834 to Tonn, Inc. See also Tonn Inc, Orleans, to Christopher P. Frey, 5 May 1978, Certificate of Title 74325; Christopher P. and Laurie J. Frey to Robert C. Lawless, trustee L&C Realty Trust, 29 December 2000, Certificate of Title 160930; Bruce and Carmelita Dinwiddie, Orleans to Lucas Dinwiddie, 3915 Main, 5 January 2016, Certificate of Title 208457. The larger of the two parcels (0.7 acre with the buildings) is shown as Parcel B on “Plan of Land in East Brewster, as Surveyed for Harry B. Winne et ux,” March 1968, BCP 218:101; the smaller is shown as Parcel 68 on “Subdivision Plan of Land in Brewster,” 2 June 1978, BC Land Court Plan 36915-D. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3915 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.182 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) View from SE. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 3915 MAIN STREET MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 BRE.182 View from NE.