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HomeMy Public PortalAboutTheChannelWay_18Follow 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 SW. Locus Map (north at top) Source: Mass GIS Oliver Parcel Viewer. Recorded by: Kathryn Grover & Neil Larson Organization: Brewster Historical Commission Date (month / year): May 2019 Assessor’s Number USGS Quad Area(s) Form Number 58-76-0 Harwich BRE.517 Town/City: Brewster Place:(neighborhood or village): Cobb’s Pond Address: 18 The Channel Way Historic Name: Seabury-Woodworth House Uses:Present: single-family residence Original: single-family residence Date of Construction: ca.1800; 1953-70 Source:deeds, historic atlases Style/Form: Colonial Revival Architect/Builder: unknown Exterior Material: Foundation: unknown Wall/Trim: wood shingles & wood clapboards/wood Roof:asphalt shingles Outbuildings/Secondary Structures: barn, late 20th century Major Alterations (with dates): extensive expansion and alteration, mid-20th cent. Condition:good Moved: no yes Date: Acreage:1.956 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 18 THE CHANNEL WAY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 1 BRE.517 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 Seabury-Woodworth House, with portions possibly built as early as 1800, has a one-story wood frame half-Cape Cod dwelling at its core. Later additions made to the sides and rear of this artifact in the mid-20th century now overwhelm it. A more intensive examination of the complex building is needed to determine what constitutes the original house and record a chronology of its evolution. The supposed Seabury house, as depicted on site plans below, is represented by the central element in the southeasterly elevation of the rambling building. It has a one-story three-bay front façade with an off-center entrance and a rebuilt brick chimney centered between the rooms flanking the entry hall. Three large gabled dormers have ben added to the roof, and the rear pitch has been raised to elevate the rear of the plan to two stories. Aerial views show a rear ell consistent with the footprints on site plans. A series of telescoping one-story wings link the northeasterly end of the core house to another traditional one- story, center-chimney house form, either built or moved here after 1953. A two-car garage is connected to the southwesterly end by a breezeway in the mid 20th-century suburban manner. More recently, a third center-chimney house form, with two more garage bays tucked under, was added to the rear of the earlier garage. A one-story, wood frame, gable-roof barn-type building of undetermined function is sited south of the house. It does not appear on any of the historic maps or plans. The house is centered amid tree-dotted lawns with foliage screening the street boundaries. A driveway enters from the south and crosses a large yard to the attached garage. The outbuilding is on the westerly side of the yard and driveway. A second driveway enters from the west and leads to the second garage in the rear of the house. HISTORICAL NARRATIVE: The property numbered 18 The Channel Way occupies land owned probably from the 1790s into the 1870s by Thomas Seabury (1764-1837) and his son Josiah Seabury (1793-1873), and local historians suggest that the current house on the property may incorporate an eighteenth-century dwelling, possibly what the 1880 Brewster map referred to as the “Old Seabury Place.” Other historic maps indicate the Seabury house was in this location. The house at this address was part of the “Breakwater Acres” subdivision platted in 1947 by Brewster builder and developer Warren E. Burgess. In 1953, after Burgess’s death, his widow sold three lots in this 79-lot subdivision to J. Edmund and Kathryn S. Bradley of Baltimore, and Burgess’s plan for Breakwater Acres shows a building already on the northernmost of the lots, one of only three existing buildings depicted on the plan.1 Thomas Seabury was a tanner and farmer and had married Betsey Hall of Yarmouth in 1788. By 1790, he may have been living in the Harwich North Precinct, later Brewster, and he was certainly in Brewster by 1814 and clearly in this neighborhood in 1820. The earliest deed of land to him describes him as a yeoman, but deeds between 1792 and 1801 describe him a tanner. According to one reminiscence in the Barnstable Patriot, “The Seabury tannery, located near the old Seabury place, was an extensive one. When we first knew it, it was carried on by the late Capt. Thomas Seabury, and later by his son, the late Josiah Seabury, who afterwards became a farmer and salt manufacturer, and in his later life for two years represented the town in the Legislature.”2 In 1819 Thomas Seabury sold “all my homestead real estate” with its house, salt works, and all other buildings to his son Josiah for $3000; the purchase included all other real property Seabury owned in the town and his meetinghouse pew.3 Josiah Seabury was shown in his own household (though possibly in the same house) after his father’s in the 1830 Brewster census. By 1850 he was a farmer with $1672 in real estate and lived with his wife Temperance Foster Seabury, their two children Josiah W. and Charlotte M., and two teenage boarders. His house is depicted on the Brewster inset on the 1858 1 Zula H. Burgess to J. Edmund and Kathryn S. Bradley, Ruxton MD, 15 January 1953, BCD 832:285; “Breakwater Acres in Brewster, Mass., Owned and Developed by Warren E. Burgess,” July 1947, BCP 79:5. The Bradleys bought the contiguous lots 44, 65, and 66 as one parcel and lots 67 and 64 as the second and third parcels in the deed. The building is shown on Lot 44. 2 “Brewster,” Barnstable Patriot, 12 February 1900, 3. 3 Thomas Seabury to Josiah Seabury, 23 September 1819, BCD 999011:89. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 18 THE CHANNEL WAY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 2 BRE.517 Barnstable County map in the vicinity of the subject property. Wife Tempe Seabury had died in 1865, and the 1870 census lists Seabury in the household with daughter Charlotte, and by 1872 he was occupying the Brewster house only seasonally.4 Josiah Seabury died in 1873, and in 1875 his son Josiah W., then living in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, sold the homestead and 30 acres of his father’s Brewster estate to George H. Freeman of Orleans and held a $500 mortgage on the property until 1881.5 Born in 1852, Freeman was one of seven children of master mariner Francis Freeman of Orleans and one of three sons, the others being Seth born in 1846, and Francis, born in 1842. In 1876 Francis Freeman Jr. was working as a “dining room keeper” in Boston when he married Marcia Flint of Lowell, and it appears that his brother George bought the Seabury property for him, for it was Francis who mortgaged the property with Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank in March 1881.6 In 1880 the census lists Francis Freeman as a farmer with “lung trouble” living in Brewster with his wife and a farm worker; in that year federal agricultural census schedules credit him with 47 acres, 30 of them improved, both milk and other cattle, 20 pigs, and 60 chickens. The year before he built a large ice house on Cobb’s Pond and carried on an ice business in Harwich until he died of consumption in 1885.7 In 1889 Francis Freeman’s widow Marcia sold the 30-acre farm to John F. Tubman for $1500. The tract stretched the from 11 Breakwater Road house of Captain William Freeman and the Main Street estate of Freeman Cobb northward to Cape Cod Bay; it was bounded on the west by Cobb’s Pond and that part of the Seabury estate called “the Pines,” which ranged from the north side of Cobb’s Pond to the shore. It was bounded on the east by the land and houses owned by G. E. Weatherbee and Cornelius Small, on the west side of Breakwater Road, and of H. D. Rowe, on the east side of that road. Fifteen of these 30 acres would become Breakwater Acres. In 1897 John F. Tubman sold this 30-acre tract with its house and buildings and an adjacent parcel known as the Rugged Shore near Cobb’s Point to Grace G. Woodworth, who at roughly the same time bought twelve other parcels, much of it the former Seabury property.8 Grace Greenleaf Taylor Woodworth (1862-1842) was the wife of Boston tea importer Herbert Grafton Woodworth, and the couple had been spending parts of their summers in Brewster since at least 1891, often arriving in town with several servants in tow.9 Woodworth’s father, Alfred R. Woodworth (1836-1911), was a Nova Scotian who had immigrated to Boston in the early 1840s. He was in the tea business on his own and then with Josiah Robinson in the firm Robinson and Woodworth; Herbert Woodworth worked for his father from an early age and was a partner in the firm from 1886 to 1927. In 1884 he married Bostonian Grace Greenleaf Taylor, and the couple had one child, Lucy, born in Brookline in 1888. In 1897 the Secretary of the Treasury appointed Woodworth to a seven-member United States Board of Tea Experts, created by Congress to regulate the “purity, quality and fitness for consumption” of teas entering the country. He was secretary of the board from the time it was created until 1927, when he retired. He traveled extensively for his business, and his experiences gave him the stuff for at least one of his two novels, In the Shadow of Lantern Street (1920). He wrote a second novel, Where the Twain Met, published in 1925.10 4 Barnstable Patriot, 14 Jan 1873, 2, notes that the Josiah Seabury barn had blown down during a storm on 26 December 1872. “It was an old one, and contained nothing of value excepting a number of tools. Mr. Seabury is spending the winter with his daughter at Wakefield.” 5 J. Warren Seabury to George H. Freeman, 20 September 1875, BCD 130: 299. Both the deed and a newspaper notice of the sale cite Freeman as George W. Freeman, and the newspaper states that Seth Freeman was also a grantee. Both almost certainly meant to indicate George H. Freeman. Judging by later deed history and genealogy, George W. was almost certainly George H. Freeman. See Barnstable Patriot, 28 September 1875, 2. See also George H. Freeman to J. Warren Seabury, 19 September 1875, BCD 119:421 (mortgage deed) and Josiah W. Seabury, Pawtucket RI, to George H. Freeman, 9 March 1881, BCD 145:315. 6 Francis Freeman Jr to Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank, Harwich, 14 March 1881, BCD 145:316. 7 See “Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 13 December 1879, 2, and “Brief Locals,” Barnstable Patriot, 24 November 1885, 2. 8 John F. Tubman to Grace G. Woodworth, 16 July 1897, BCD 227:506. Woodworth’s holdings totaled well more than 70 acres. Acreage was not specified for 4 of the 13 parcels. Four of the parcels included buildings, among them the Seabury estate, the Captain William Freeman property, and the H. D. Rowe property. The holdings are detailed in both Grace G. Woodworth to William L. Carlton, Boston, 25 January 1932, BCD 487:141, and William L. Carlton, Boston, to Herbert G. and Grace G. Woodworth, 25 January 1932, BCD 484:380, the latter of which cites prior titles. 9 See Barnstable Patriot, 14 July 1891, 3; 28 June 1892, 3; 20 June 1893, 5; and Hyannis Patriot, 1 July 1895, 5. Before buying property in Brewster the Woodworths lived at the Freeman Cobb house, which they acquired from William Freeman in 1896 (BDD 224:521); see also “Brewster,” Yarmouth Register, 24 October 1896, 1. 10 See “Herbert G. Woodworth Chosen,” Boston Post, 20 March 1897, 6; ; “Mr Woodworth Again Appointed,” Boston Globe, 16 January 1906, 9; “Death Claims Tea Merchant,” Boston Herald, 3 September 1911, 4; “News of the Cape Cod Resorts,” Boston Herald, 9 July 1911, 7; “Latest Books,” Boston Globe, 6 March 1920, 9; “Herbert G. Woodworth,” Boston Globe, 13 August 1949, 11; ““H. T. [sic] Woodworth, Tea Expert, 89, Dies at Brewster,” Boston Herald, 13 August 1949, 5. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 18 THE CHANNEL WAY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 3 BRE.517 In Brewster the Woodworths probably occupied the Captain William Freeman House at 15 Breakwater Road (BRE.118); the family of Woodworth’s father Alfred, also Brewster summer residents, may sometimes have occupied the former Seabury house. Herbert Woodworth was one of a group of affluent Brewster people who organized to protest State Board of Charity plans to locate a leper hospital in Brewster in 1905.11 The comings and goings of him and his wife were often reported in Cape newspapers. Grace G. Woodworth died in 1942 and her husband Herbert died in 1949. In 1946 the conservator of his property sold 15 acres of the 30-acre Seabury estate to Warren E. Burgess. who developed the Breakwater Acres subdivision.12 Burgess, who had begun his career as an orchestra musician and weir fisherman, began to develop vacant land in Brewster for summer homes in the 1910s and ultimately created the large-scale subdivisions of Breakwater Acres, Pineland Park, and Scenic Acres in Brewster and Portanimicut Village in Orleans. He died in October 1951, and in January 1953 his widow Zula Higgins Burgess sold five parcels in Breakwater Acres to the Bradleys.13 John Edmund Bradley, born in Baltimore in 1906, was a pediatrician and by the late 1940s a professor of pediatrics at Maryland University School of Medicine; he was head of the pediatrics department at that hospital by 1956. He married Kathryn Davis Strong in Washington, D.C., in 1933. The Bradleys owned 18 The Channel Way until 1970, Richard B. and Polly Winslow owned the property from 1970 to 1986, and Thomas C. and Patricia M. Schmidt were owners until 2017. Thomas C. Schmidt sold 18 The Channel Way to Andrew K. and Jane R. Murphy of East Dennis in that year.14 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. 11 “The Hearing in Boston,” Barnstable Patriot, 9 January 1905, 2. 12 Grace M. Peirce, Topsfield, conservator of property of Herbert G. Woodworth, West Newbury, to Warren E. Burgess, 9 May 1946, BCD 646:474. See “Plan of Lands in Brewster, Mass. as Made for Herbert G. Woodworth,” March 1975, BCP 71:107. 13 Zula H. Burgess to J. Edmund and Kathryn S. Bradley, Ruxton MD, 15 January 1953, BCD 832:285. 14 J. Edmund and Kathryn S. Bradley to Richard B. Winslow, 2 September 1970, 1483:447; Richard B. Winslow to Thomas C. and Patricia J. Schmidt, 11 July 1986, BCD 5185:177; Thomas C. Schmidt, 18 The ChannelWay, to Andrew K. and Jane R. Murphy, East Dennis, 30 January 2017, BCD 30284:90. See BCP 79:5. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 18 THE CHANNEL WAY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 4 BRE.517 FIGURES Herbert G. Woodworth subdivided his Brewster property bordering Cobb’s Pond in 1945; The house at 18 The Channel Way stands on Parcel A. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 18 THE CHANNEL WAY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 BRE.517 Burgess’s 1947 plan for Breakwater Acres shows 79 lots, most of them bordering Cobb’s Pond or Cape Cod Bay. A building stood at that time on Lot 44, one of three contiguous lots the Bradleys acquired from widow Zula Burgess in 1953. INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET BREWSTER 18 THE CHANNEL WAY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD,BOSTON,MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 6 BRE.517 PHOTOGRAPHS (credit Neil Larson, 2019) View from NW.