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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 and Neil Larson
Organization: Brewster Historical Commission
Date (month / year): June 2018
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
101-78 Harwich BRE.473
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
East Brewster
Address:99 Millstone Road
Historic Name: Ray E. & Rosa B. Cowen House
Uses:Present: single-family residential
Original: single-family residential
Date of Construction: ca. 1920
Source:deeds, censuses
Style/Form: Cape Cod
Architect/Builder: Nelson F. Perry, probable builder
Exterior Material:
Foundation: concrete block
Wall/Trim: wood shingle/wood
Roof:asphalt shingle
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
Garage (attached)
Major Alterations (with dates):
Wood shingles added &
New windows installed, ca. 2016
Condition:fair
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage: 1.54
Setting: This house is situated on the north side of a
bypassed section of Main Street (Rt. 6A) in the midst of
residential subdivisions created in the late twentieth century.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 99 MILLSTONE ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
BRE.473
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 Ray E. and Rosa B. Cowen House, built about 1920, is a one-story wood frame single dwelling designed in an early
twentieth-century Cape Cod style. It has a three-bay front façade with a center entrance and a small one-story wing that likely is
original to the house. A garage and workshop, probably built later, is attached to the house wing by a short hyphen. The house
is situated at the front of a deep and narrow lot and appears to have been paired with a lot of similar dimension adjoining on the
south. The land had been farmed but has reforested. A driveway enters from Millstone Road and terminates in front of the
garage.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE
In April 1919, the executor of the will of Roland Crosby Nickerson Jr. sold two adjacent parcels on Millstone Road in East
Brewster to Brewster carpenter Nelson F. Perry.1 Nickerson, a grandson of East Brewster native and wealthy Chicago banker
Samuel Mayo Nickerson, was serving in the United States Navy Intelligence Department in Washington when he succumbed to
influenza and then pneumonia during the postwar flu epidemic; he died at the U.S. Naval Hospital in October 1918 at age 28.2
Born in 1874 in Brewster, Nelson Francis Perry was the son of fisherman Francis H. Perry and Rebecca F. Bassett Perry of
Brewster. His father was a fishing vessel captain who owned at least some of his vessels, and son Nelson worked with his father
in his trade. In 1895 the Barnstable Patriot reported the Nelson Perry “has gone to work at carpentering,” and the same
newspaper reported in 1914 that he had built a cottage in Brewster for Winthrop Crocker “on the Crocker shore.” In 1903 he
married Mary F. Lack of Yarmouthport, and by 1910 the census lists Perry as a house carpenter in a dwelling he owned. He and
his wife by then had two daughters—Alice, born in 1905, and Mildred, born in 1908. Perry and his father both worked for the
Roland Nickerson family: in 1914 Nelson became the superintendent of Fieldstone Hall, the Main Street mansion of Roland C.
Nickerson Sr., in 1915 his father worked as captain on Nickerson’s yacht, and in 1917 Nelson went to Boothbay, Maine, with
Nickerson to inspect a new vessel being built there for him. The 1920 census shows Nelson Perry as manager of a private
estate, no doubt Fieldstone Hall.3
Though his 1919 deed and later ones do not mention buildings, Perry probably built the cottage now numbered 99 Millstone
Road about 1920, soon after buying the property. In 1926 he sold the Millstone Road property to Ray E. Cowen and, by then
divorced, moved to Centreville and later to Ohio, where he lived with Mabelle Pope, identified as his married sister, and worked
as an estate gardener. By 1940 he and Mabelle, here shown as his wife Mabelle Perry, had returned to East Brewster and were
living on Main Street, though exactly where cannot be determined from census records.
Nelson Perry sold most of the 99 Millstone Road parcel to Ray Ellsworth Cowen in 1920 and another part in 1926.4 Assessor’s
records for 1926 taxed Perry on only personal estate and Cowen on a house valued at $700, a garage at $200, outbuildings at
$100, and a 1.5-acre homestead lot at $75; he also owned four cranberry parcels, a half-acre of asparagus land, and two other
parcels. Cowen, born in Brewster in 1886, was the son of painter and house joiner Charles Irving Cowen (1864-1940), a native
of Brunswick, Maine, and his wife Hattie C. Hallett, from Chatham. They had married the year before in Brewster. In 1908 Ray
Cowen married Rosa Browning Nickerson, a Brewster native then living in Wellfleet and the daughter of Willis B. and Clara Ellis
Nickerson. By 1918, according to his draft registration record, Cowen was working for Roland C. Nickerson as a farmer, and the
1920 census shows him as a farm worker owning his property and occupying it with his wife and their children Helen L., Grace
R., and Mary E, born between 1909 and 1916. The 1920 census shows Nelson Perry as renting and the Cowens as owning, but
1 James M. Swift, Fall River, executor will Roland C. Nickerson, to Nelson F. Perry, 10 April 1919, BCD 368:271.
2 Born in December 1889, Roland C. Nickerson had married in 1923, graduated Williams College in 1914, and enlisted in the U.S. Naval Rserve in March 1917.
He was in command of the U.S.S. Winchester, undertaking coastal defense and submarine patrol, and the U.S.S. Roanoke, doing mine-laying overseas, before
being assigned to the Navy’s intelligence department. Death notices were published for him, but no detailed obituary has yet been found; see Nickerson’s entry
on FindaGrave.com.
3 On the Perrys see Barnstable Patriot, 28 January 1901, 3; 29 April 1901, 3; 27 April 1914, 5; 16 November 194, 3; 31 May 1915, 4; and 26 February 1917, 3.
4 Nelson F. Perry to Ray E. Cowen, 7 June 1920, BCD 372:345, and 5 August 1926, BCD 594:7. Barnstable Patriot, 4 October 1920, 2, reported the first
transaction.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 99 MILLSTONE ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
BRE.473
it was taken in mid-January 1920, before Perry sold the first lot to Cowen in June. Whether 99 Millstone Road was standing at
that time is unclear.
The 1930 census lists Ray Cowen as a private estate caretaker in his own home on Cliff Pond Road, today Millstone Road, with
his wife Rosa and son Ray E. Cowen Jr. born in 1927. He is listed with the same occupation in 1940 but living on State Road. In
1942 he sold 99 Millstone Road to his married daughter Grace E. McCandless, then of West Boylston, with a racial restriction,
and by that year he was living in Worcester and working in a machine shop.5
Born in August 1912, Grace Elizabeth Cowen married Richard Stuart Chalk of Yarmouth in 1928, when she was working as a
waitress in Hyannis; she is shown in Dennis as a roomer without her husband in the 1930 census. By 1934 she had married a
second time, and by 1941 she had divorced and married again, to John H. McCandless of Boylston. McCandless owned 99
Millstone Road until 1958. The property changed hands five more time before being sold in November 2016 to Koi Pond Realty
LLC.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 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)
5 Ray E. Cowen to Grace E. McCandless, West Boylston, 16 July 1942, BCD 638:434. The deed stated that the property “shall not be sold to or occupied by a
person of the Negro race.”
6 Grace E. McCandless to Anthony and Catherine E. Peters, 23 October 1958, BCD 1020:216; Charles P. Escobar, Eastham, executor will Anthony Peters, and
Catherine E. Peters, Eastham, to H. Russell Crosby, 10 February 1977, BCD 2468:288; H. Russell Crosby, Orleans, to Robert A. and Kim Slezak, 21 December
1987, BCD 6075:180; Federal National Mortgage Association (fka Fannie Mae) to Loocie S. Brown, Cambridge, 27 February 2013, BCD 27175:148; Loocie S.
Brown, Cambridge, to Koi Pond Realty LLC, 10 November 2016, BCD 30170:137. The 99 Millstone Road property is shown without buildings as Lot A on “Plan
of Land of Roland C. Nickerson, Brewster, Mass.,” October 1915, BCP 57:69.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 99 MILLSTONE ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
BRE.473
View from SW.
Aerial view from north. Screen capture from google.com/maps.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 99 MILLSTONE ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 4
BRE.473
Aerial view from north. Screen capture from google.com/maps.