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Home My Public Portal AboutOldLongPondRd_231Follow 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 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 93-38-0 Harwich BRE.518 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): South Brewster Address:231 Old Long Pond Road Historic Name: Elisha F. & Elnora Eldridge House Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca. 1869 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: Colonial Revival/cross wing Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: brick Wall/Trim: wood shingles/wood Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: accessory building (poss. schoolhouse) miscellaneous sheds Major Alterations (with dates): single siding & shed dormer added, ca. 1933 façade altered & entrance relocated, ca. 1933 porches added, ca. 1933 window sash replaced, lozenge panes, ca. 1933 Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:0.43 acre Setting: The house is situated in a dense residential area characterized by summer cottages and retirement homes built in the mid-20th century. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 231 OLD LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.518 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 Elisha F. and Elnora Eldridge house is a story-and-a-half wood frame single family dwelling with a cross-wing plan. Other than its basic form, the exterior appearance of the house embodies a Colonial Revival cottage style introduced with renovations made in the 1930s. The front gable façade probably contained an entrance in the space where a small elevated window with lozenge panes now is located; a pair of windows with lozenge-pane upper sash have likely replaced two single windows completing the original three-bay first story. The front wall of the wing has been bumped out with its knee-wall porch. The current front entrance is located in the wing at the corner where it intersects the front gabled section, and a single shed-roof dormer is centered in the roof. A second porch with column posts in the corners extends from the southerly end of the wing in which a door has been added for access. Windows with lozenge-pane upper sashes have been added singly and in pairs throughout. Among the number of sheds scattered around the house is a sizeable one-story wood frame building with a gable roof and a center entrance flanked by windows. The 1858 Cape Cod map shows a schoolhouse in this vicinity, and it may be extant in this building. The house is sited close to the street behind a heavy foliage screen. A driveway runs along the north lot line and a yard is framed by foliage south of the house. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The house now numbered 231 Old Long Pond Road was very likely built between 1866 and 1869 possibly to serve as a home for the keeper of a store for Warren Lincoln and his son Warren F. Lincoln, who had acquired the 0.75-acre property in 1866. The Lincolns bought the parcel from Matilda E. Eldridge, the daughter of Abner E. and Saloma Eldridge Cahoon and wife of Christopher C. Eldridge (1839-1920); her father’s household was just north on Long Pond Road, and she had acquired the parcel the year before from Eldridge Small, who lived in this South Brewster neighborhood. The Lincolns were, however, bankrupt by November 1869, and the property, by then with a house and it, was sold to Matilda’s husband Christopher Eldridge. He immediately took out a mortgage on it with Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank. Matilda Cahoon Eldridge died in 1868, and in 1869 Christopher Eldridge married again, to Emma F. Cahoon, his first wife’s niece (through marriage) and a daughter of Abner Cahoon’s younger brother Levi. The 1870 census lists the couple in this part of Brewster with $600 in real property. In 1878 Cape Cod Five Cents Savings foreclosed on Eldridge’s mortgage and sold 231 Old Long Pond Road to Elisha Foster Eldridge, Christopher Eldridge’s nephew.1 In 1883 Elisha Eldridge bought an adjoining 3.5-acre lot, and he owned and occupied 231 Old Long Pond Road for the next half-century.2 Born in Brewster in 1851, Elisha Eldridge was the eldest son of Jacob and Mary Small Eldridge, also denizens of this neighborhood. He lived in his parents’ household and worked as a fisherman through at least the early 1870s, and in 1879 he married Elnora Eldridge, the daughter of Ephraim and Salome Cahoon Eldridge of Harwich. The 1880 census lists the couple in their own household between the households of his father and Abner E. Cahoon, and the 1880 Barnstable County atlas mistakenly attaches the name “E. E. Foster” to the house; no Fosters lived in this southernmost section of South Brewster at the time, the initials are the same if transposed, Elisha Eldridge often went by “Foster” or E. Foster Eldridge. The couple had two children—Alton F. in 1884 and Lester E. in 1893—both of whom were living in their parents’ household and doing odd jobs in 1910. Elnora Eldridge died in 1917, son Alton died in 1918, and son Lester died of tuberculosis in 1920. Elisha Eldridge is listed on South Brewster Road in the 1929 Cape Cod directory, but by 1930 he was living at Sailors’ Snug Harbor on Staten Island, New 1 Eldredge Small to Matilda E. Eldridge, 18 November 1865, BCD 91:30; Matilda E. Eldridge to Warren Lincoln and Co., 28 August 1866, BCD 91:31; O. W. Upham, assignee of Warren Lincoln and Warren F. Lincoln, both Melrose, in bankruptcy, to Christopher Eldredge, 6 November 1869, BCD 99:538; Christopher Eldridge to Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, 26 November 1869, BCD 101:73 (mortgage deed); Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank to Elisha F. Eldridge, 8 April 1878, BCD 134:181. 2 Allen S. Joseph, Harwich, to Elisha F. Eldridge, 24 February 1883, BCD 612:91. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 231 OLD LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.518 York, and he died there in April 1931. In July 1933 Jacob Andrew Eldridge, his younger brother and administrator of his estate, sold 231 Long Pond Road to Elizabeth A. Comerford of Dorchester.3 The daughter of Irish immigrant machinist James Comerford, she was born in Boston in 1880 and was working as an artist in a post card factory by 1920, when she lived with eleven others in the Boston lodging house. In 1944 she sold the house and its 4.25 acres to Martin Alonzo Graham of Cambridge, whose married sister Hazel Graham Jerauld had acquired 177 Old Long Pond Road in 1942. Born in 1897 in Somerville, Martin Graham had been a cake maker and a wholesale shipping employee during his working life and lived through at least 1944 at his parents’ Cambridge home. He owned 231 Old Long Pond Road until 1953, when he sold it to Kenneth V. and Evelyn M. Castle of White Plains, New York.4 The Castles owned the property for the next two decades and subdivided it in 1969; the house, outbuilding, and barn stood on one parcel, and the second parcel, to the south, was 2.67 acres and undeveloped. The owners in 2018, Frederick and Alice M. Sobota of Fulton, New York, bought an undivided half interest in 231 Old Long Pond Road from Donald W. and Jo-Anne V. Kerr in 1976 and acquired the Kerrs’ interest in 1986.5 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 Jacob A. Eldridge, administrator estate Elisha F. Eldridge, to Elizabeth M. Comerford, Dorchester, 17 July 1933, BCD 497:64 4 Elizabeth M. Comerford, Boston (Dorchester) to Martin Graham, Cambridge, 1 April 1944, BCD 612:92; Martin Graham, Cambridge, to Kenneth V. and Evelyn M. Castle, White Plains NY, 17 August 1953, BCD 851:387. 5 Kenneth V. and Evelyn M. Castle, Old Long Pond Road, to Donald W. and Jo-Anne V. Kerr, Eastham, 15 March 1974, BCD 2014:161; Donald W. and Jo-Anne V. Kerr, Long Pond Road, to Douglas W. and Lorraine Johnson, Frederick and Alice M. Sobota, 7 June 1976, BCD 2364:302; Douglas W. and Lorraine Johnson to Frederick and Alice M. Sobota, Fulton NY, 1 August 1986, BCD 5296:88. The property is Parcel 1 on “Plan of Land in Brewster, Mass., Made for Kenneth V. Castle and Evelyn M. Castle,” May 1969, BCP 231:47. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 231 OLD LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.518 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2018) View from south. View from NW. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 231 OLD LONG POND ROAD MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 BRE.518 View of outbuilding (possibly a schoolhouse) from west.