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FORM B BUILDING
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION
MASSACHUSETTS ARCHIVES BUILDING
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD
BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Photograph
View from north.
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
94-15-0 Harwich BRE.156
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
South Brewster
Address:156-58 Old Long Pond Road
Historic Name: Nathan & Sarah Darling House
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1860
Source:deeds, historic atlases, censuses
Style/Form: Greek Revival
Architect/Builder: unknown
Exterior Material:
Foundation: stone
Wall/Trim: wood clapboard & wood shingles/wood
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
barn, moved and converted to a garage, ca. 1950
Major Alterations (with dates):
sun porch added south side, 1953
brick chimney added south side
wing added north side
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage:1.003
Setting: The house is situated in a residential area
characterized by summer cottages and retirement homes
built in the 19th and 20th centuries.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 156-58 OLD LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
BRE.156
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 Nathan and Sarah Darling House, built ca. 1860, is a two-story wood frame single dwelling of an end house type designed
in the Greek Revival style. It has a three-bay front façade with an entrance offset on the northerly side. Fenestration on the side
walls suggest that the entrance may have been moved from the southerly corner and the interior side-hall plan altered in the 20th
century. Windows positioned in the front of the northerly side, as well as a one-story bedroom wing added in 1952-53, indicate
the absence of a stair in the current entry, with the blank section of wall on the front of the southerly wall, with an exterior brick
chimney added later, being more characteristic of a side hall with a stair. The lintel surmounting the architrave framing the
current entrance appears to be a later addition as well. A story-and-a-half kitchen wing attached to the rear of the house also is
in a location that would have been appropriately at the back of the hall. Its southerly façade contains a trabeated entrance and
window headers more elaborate than that found on the front façade. A sun porch has been added to the south side of the house
in front of the kitchen wing. Another wing is attached to the rear of the wing.
According to notes on the existing MHC B Form, a barn once located behind the house was moved to the north side of the yard
and converted into a garage with two overhead doors. The house is situated in the southeast corner of an acre lot fronting on
Old Long Pond Road on the east and Morning Star Cartway on the south. A driveway enters the property from Old Long Pond
Road north of the house and terminates at the barn/garage. The rest of the property is maintained as a yard sheltered by mature
trees.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
The deed transferring the tract on which 156-58 Old Long Pond Road stands has not yet been located, but the house bearing
that number appears to have been built between 1858 (when, according to the Cape Cod atlas of that year, its site is not
occupied) and 1865, when the order of enumeration in that year’s state census indicates that it was owned and occupied by
Nathan Darling. Born in 1832 in Orleans, Darling was a mariner and a shoemaker, and he was working at the latter trade in 1857
when he married Sarah A. Cahoon, the 22-year-old daughter of Abner and Salome Eldridge Cahoon of South Brewster. Abner
Cahoon (1814-74) lived on the east side of Long Pond Road and probably owned the land on which his married daughter’s
house was built roughly opposite his own.
The 1860 census lists Nathan Darling with his wife and one-year-old daughter Lydia in the nearby household of Sabra Cahoon
Small (1795-1864), whose husband James had died earlier that year. Also in the household were Sabra’s son Charles W., a
farmer, her husband’s cousin Eldridge Small (1790-1880), and Eldridge’s wife Hannah Cahoon Small.1 The census credits
Nathan Darling with $100 in real property, which may have been the lot on which the house was built. The 1865 state census
shows Darling as a mariner in a household of his own in the same neighborhood and living with his wife, daughter Lydia A. (later
identified as Annie L. Darling), and infant son, listed here as James but actually son Nathan Henry. The 1870 census lists
Darling as a fisherman, and the 1880 map attaches the name “N. Darling” to the house on this site. By then Darling had become
a butcher, and he lived with his wife and son Nathan and a Samuel Darling, w ho was born in 1871 but about whom nothing else
has been discovered. Brewster assessor’s records for 1890 taxed Darling on a house valued at $300, a barn at $50, a half-acre
homestead lot at $50, and seven acres of woodland valued at $20.
By 1900 Nathan and Sarah Darling had moved to Yarmouthport to live with their son Nathan Henry, a railroad switchman who
had married Lottie A. Clark of Brewster in 1892. Nathan Darling died in 1902 and his widow in 1913, both in Yarmouthport, and
the 156-58 Old Long Pond Road property passed to son Nathan H. (though again no deed documents this transfer). He very
likely rented the homestead. He died in Yarmouthport in 1927, and two years later his widow, sister Annie L. Stevens, and
1 Though Sabra Cahoon Small and Hannah Cahoon Small were contemporaries, they were not sisters; the former was the daughter of William
and Mary Long Cahoon, the latter of Jesse and Thankful Cahoon.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 156-58 OLD LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
BRE.156
children sold two acres and the South Brewster house to Edward Patrick Byrne of Harwich.2 Born in Ireland about 1880, Byrne
came to the United States as a child and was a state and local road foreman in the 1930s and 1940s. He does not appear to
have occupied 156-58 Old Long Pond Road, and he defaulted on a mortgage he had taken out with Cape Cod Five Cents
Savings Bank by 1937. In 1940 the bank sold the property to Grace M. and Clinton DeWitt Cave, who owned it for the next 12
years.3 Born in New York State, D. Clinton Cave was an assistant treasurer and later vice president and treasurer of Provident
Institution for Savings in Boston, and the family lived most of the year in Arlington.
In October 1952 the Caves sold 156-58 Old Long Pond Road to Mildred and Claude A. Butterfield of Whitman.4 Born in
Weathersfield, Vermont, in 1877, Claude Albert Butterfield was a Congregational minister and served parishes in Ludlow,
Foxboro, Springfield, Fairhaven, Lexington, and Whitman throughout his career, and from 1939 to 1953 he was executive
director of the Save the Children Federation. After the death of his first wife Nettie Maude Howells, in 1929 he married Mildred
Moore, who had emigrated from England just two years earlier. The family lived in Lexington until 1935, then in Whitman, and in
1952 or 1953, when Butterfield retired, they moved permanently to Brewster (married daughter Jean E. Leek and her husband
Jacques acquired 236 Old Long Pond Road in 1952 as well). Claude Butterfield died in 1968, and in 1988 his widow Mildred
Moore Butterfield deeded about an acre and the house to her married daughter Patricia M. McLeod.5 Mildred Butterfield died in
1989, and McLeod owned 156-58 Old Long Pond Road until August 2018, when she placed the property in trust under Diane M.
Delaney of Darien, Connecticut.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.
2 Lottie A. Darling, widow; A. Mildred Baker, Alice M. Darling, and H. Raymond Darling, all Yarmouth; Gladys L. Weekes and Annie Stevens,
both Barnstable; and Ethel L. Whittemore, Dennis, to Edward P. Byrne, 9 February 1929, BCD 464:22. See also affidavits from Kosciusko
Nickers and Elisha F. Eldridge, 27 February 1929, BCD 464:21.
3 Edward P. Byrne to Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, 10 November 1937, BCD 533:223; Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank to Grace M.
and D. Clinton Cave, 21 November 1940, BCD 573:202.
4 Grace M. and D. Clinton Cave, Arlington, to Mildred and Claude A. Butterfield, Whitman, 9 October 1952, BCD 824:347.
5 “Rev. Butterfield of Brewster Dead at 90,” Boston Globe, 13 November 1968, 56.
6 Mildred Butterfield to Patricia M. McLeod, trustee 158 Old Long Pond Road Realty Trust, 7 March 1988, BCD 6169:48; Patricia M. McLeod to
Patricia Mary McLeod, 158 Old Long Pond Road, trustee Patricia Mary McLeod Living Trust, 2 April 2008, BCD 22845:63; Patricia Mary
McLeod, 158 Old Long Pond Road, trustee Patricia Mary McLeod Living Trust, to Diane M. Delaney, Darien CT, trustee Patricia M. McLeod
Irrevocable Trust, 6 August 2018, BCD 31477:82. The 156-58 Old Long Pond Road parcel is Parcel A on “Plan of Land in Brewster,
Massachusetts, as Surveyed for Chester C. McLeod,” 20 June 1973, BCD 273:55.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 156-58 OLD LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
BRE.156
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018)
View from south.
View of garage from east.