HomeMy Public PortalAboutOldLongPondRd_198Follow Massachusetts Historical Commission Survey Manual instructions for completing this form.4/11
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 & Neil Larson
Organization: Brewster Historical Commission
Date (month / year): June 2018
Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number
93-24-0 Harwich BRE.157
Town/City: Brewster
Place:(neighborhood or village):
South Brewster
Address:198 Old Long Pond Road
Historic Name: James & Sabra Small House & Barn
Uses:Present: single-family residence
Original: single-family residence
Date of Construction: ca. 1815
Source:deeds, historic atlases
Style/Form: Federal / 2/3 Cape
Architect/Builder: Moses Small, possible builder
Exterior Material:
Foundation: brick
Wall/Trim: wood clapboard & wood shingles/wood
Roof:asphalt shingles
Outbuildings/Secondary Structures:
barn
cottage in woods in rear
Major Alterations (with dates):
window sash replaced
Condition:good
Moved: no yes Date:
Acreage:1.38 acres
Setting: The house is situated in a dense residential area
characterized by summer cottages and retirement homes
built in the 19th and 20th centuries.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 198 OLD LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 1
BRE.157
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 James and Sabra Small House, built ca. 1815, is a one-story wood frame single dwelling of a two-thirds cape type with
connected outbuildings and a detached barn. The exterior of the house displays features identical to the house next door at 230
Old Long Pond Road built by James’s brother Moses Small, a housewright, suggesting that this house was built by him as well.
The front façade has been altered with an entrance and adjoining window added later, replacing an earlier doorway in this
location. The height of the front wall is subtly taller than that on Moses’s house, but the trimwork along the eaves is identical. A
brick chimney is centrally located between rooms typical of the deep traditional plan; a second chimney has been added to the
exterior of the north wall, and a bay window added to the south side. A one-story cross-gable kitchen ell is attached to the rear of
the house. Its principal south-facing façade has been altered with the addition of a triple window unit and a shed-roof dormer; a
mud room is appended to the rear end of the ell. Unlike Moses’s house at 236 Old Long Pond Road, which has a connected
barn (added in a later stage), the subject house has a detached barn of a design more typical of the turn of the 19th century. The
story-and-a-half building has a gable roof in the manner of the traditional English barn form, but the current wagon doors are
offset to one side rather than centered on the façade. The exterior is finished with new materials, and further examination is
needed to date the building accurately.
The house is sited near the street set back behind small yards on the front and south side; a larger yard is located on the north
side of the house. A driveway enters the frontage south of the house and runs past it to the barn in the rear. No examination has
been made of the secondary building in the woods at the rear of the property.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE:
The house now numbered 198 Old Long Pond Road was standing on its lot by December 1817, when Eli Small deeded a parcel
with a house and other buildings that bordered Long Pond Road, Greenland Pond, Long Pond, and other land owned by Eli and
other Smalls to his sons Eldridge Small (1790-1880) and Moses Small (1797-1849). Eli Small (1767-1850) and his wife Elisabeth
Rogers lived in Harwich, and whose house he passed to his sons is not stated in deeds. Two weeks later, Eldridge Small, who
lived in Brewster, and his brother deeded to their first cousin James Small (1794-1860) a 1.5-acre tract with a dwelling house or
“tenement” that may have been the house standing on the larger tract their father had sold them.1 Early in 1815, James Small
had married Sabra Cahoon (1795-1864), and the couple had one child, Anna, by the time Small acquired this tract from his
cousins. Small and his wife had four other children—James Jr., Vianna, Marinda, and Charles W.—between 1824 and 1837.
The 1850 census lists Small as a farmer living with his wife and three younger children in this neighborhood; son James Jr. was
probably at sea, and he was lost at sea in 1857.
James Small died in 1860, and the 1860 census enumerates the household of his widow in this neighborhood. She was then
living with her son Charles, a farmer, her husband’s cousin Eldridge Small and his wife Hannah, and the family of Nathan
Darling. Sabra Cahoon Small died in 1864, and censuses indicate that the property passed to her son Charles W. Small, who
married Lucy Eldridge in 1868. The 1880 census lists him as a 42-year-old laborer with his wife and daughters Sabra A., born in
1869, and Mary L., born in 1873, after the household of Nathan Darling, who had by then moved to a house next door at 156-58
Long Pond Road (BRE.156).
Two months before he died in July 1900 Charles W. Small sold the house to Kosciusko Nickerson. In early October other Small
heirs sold adjoining property to Nickerson.2 Named for the Polish hero of the American Revolution, Kosciusko Nickerson was the
son of Bangs and Diana Rogers Nickerson of Harwich and was born about 1847. His father, a farmer, had died accidentally in
1 Eli Small, Harwich, to Moses Small, Harwich, 11 December 1817, BCD 999011:273; Eldredge Small, Brewster, and Moses Small, Harwich, to
James Small, 29 December 1817, BCD 999011:292.
2 Charles W. Small to Kosciusko Nickerson, 27 July 1900, BCD 246:179; Louisa Small and Almena Smith to Kosciusko Nickerson, 6 October
1900, BCD 254:139.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 198 OLD LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 2
BRE.157
1853, and his mother was left with four children between the ages of six and seventeen. By 1860 Kosciusko, then thirteen, was
the only one of the children living with his mother in Harwich, and the two had the income of a boarding mariner and his wife.
In 1869 Kosciusko Nickerson was working as a tailor in Harwich when he married Asenith F. Cahoon, the daughter of Levi and
Matilda Eldridge Cahoon, who were then living in this South Brewster neighborhood. The couple had one son, Roy Wilworth
Nickerson, in 1889 in Harwich, and remained in that town until they bought the James and Sabra Small House. They owned and
occupied the house until their deaths, Asenith in 1924 and Kosciusko in 1933.3 In 1935 son Roy sold farm to Edward Everett
Elder and his sister Genevieve of Medford.4
Born in 1879 and 1884 respectively, they were the children of Cambridge printer Samuel Elder and his wife Emma J. Bryant
Elder. In 1907 Edward, by then an attorney, married Nebraska native Alice E. Stowell and had two children by 1910; she died
between 1920 and 1930, and by the latter year Elder had married Dulcie Elaine Hall, who was born in Jamaica in 1901; her
father, Edward James Hall, was from Antigua, and her mother, Molly Marshall, was a native of Tennessee. By 1910 the family
lived in Boston, where Edward Hall was a book publisher. The 1930 Medford census lists Dulcie E. Elder, then 39 years old, in a
household with her 60-year-old husband Edward E. Elder, Edward’s sister Genevieve, a magazine editor, and their widowed
mother Emma Elder. By 1940 Edward and Dulcie Elder lived in Medford with Genevieve, then a newspaper copyeditor, and
Dulcie’s widowd mother Mary E. Hall, who had moved there from Jacksonville, Florida.
Edward E. Elder died in Medford in March 1952, and in the same year his widow Dulcie moved to 198 Old Long Pond Road
permanently.5 In October 1985 Dulcie Elder subdivided the property, and she died in December of the same year. In 1988 the
executor of her will, Mary Jane Wheeler, deeded the property to herself and Dulcie Elaine Clark of Kaneohe, Hawaii, whose
relation if any to Elder has not yet been determined. Clark, who by 2002 was known as Dulcie Sloane and lived in Dennis,
transferred her interest in 198 Old Long Pond Road to Wheeler. In 2001 Wheeler reserved a life estate in the house when she
deeded the property to Beth E. Farrell of Fayetteville, New York, and Jeffrey H. Wheeler of Harvest, Alabama.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.
3 The death record of Kosciusko Nickerson states the cause of death as “heart disease found dead in hay chute where he had fallen.”
4 Roy W. Nickerson, Chatham, to Edward E. and Genevieve Elder, Medford, 23 September 1935, BCD 514:120.
5 From Teresa C. Ellis, MHC Form B, 198 Old Long Pond Road (BRE.157), 14 August 1980.
6 Mary Jane Wheeler, executor will Dulcie E. Elder, to Mary Jane Wheeler, 198 Old Long Pond Road, and Duclie Elaine Clark, Kaneone HI, 29
November 1988, BCD 6593:319; Mary Jane Wheeler, 198 Old Long Pond Road, to Dulcie Elaine Clark, Kaneone HI, 26 June 1990, BCD
7471:54; Dulcie Sloane, Dennis, to Mary Jane Wheeler, 30 September 2002, BCD 15756:200; Mary Jane Wheeler, 198 Old Long Pond Road,
to Beth E. Farrell, Fayetteville NY, and Jeffrey H. Wheeler, Harvest AL, 4 March 2011, BCD 25300:9. The parcel is Lot 1A on “Subdivision Plan
of Land in Brewster, Mass., Prepared for Dulcie Elder,” 26 October 1985, SBP 414:38.
INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 198 OLD LONG POND ROAD
MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No.
220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125
Continuation sheet 3
BRE.157
PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018)
View from SE.
View from NE.