Category: Colonial

Sargent House Museum (1782)

by Dan//Colonial, Gloucester, Houses

Sargent House Museum
Sargent House Museum

The Sargent House Museum is located at 49 Middle Street in Gloucester. Also known as the Sargent-Murray-Gilman-Hough House, the home was built in 1782 for Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), an author and early advocate for women’s rights, and her first husband, Capt. John Stevens, a merchant in the West Indies trade. Her second husband was John Murray, a founder of the Universalist Church in America. The museum has a collection of American furniture and art, including paintings by Sargent family descendant John Singer Sargent.

The Wayside (1717)

by Dan//Colonial, Concord, Houses, Victorian Eclectic

The Wayside in Concord (not to be confused with Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury) is a historic home (now part of Minute Man National Historic Park) that was the residence of several famous authors over the years. The oldest part of the house may date to as early as 1717. Minuteman Samuel Whitney, who owned two slaves, lived in the house at time of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. The first of the authors to live in the house was Louisa May Alcott, whose parents, Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott, owned it from 1845 to 1852. They named their home “Hillside” and made additions to the original saltbox structure (see image below). Many of Louisa’s experiences in the house were later incorporated in her famous book Little Women. The family would eventually move to Boston, but later in the 1850s would live back in Concord in nearby Orchard House. Nathaniel Hawthorne purchased the house from the Alcotts in 1852. Hawthorne renamed the house the Wayside and made his own additions to the building around 1860. He died in 1864 and his widow sold the house in 1870, but their daughter Rose and her husband, George P. Lathrop later owned it for a time, selling it in 1883 to Boston publisher Daniel Lothrop and his wife Harriett. Under the pen name Margaret Sidney, Harriett wrote The Five Little Peppers series of children’s books, published between 1881 and 1916. They added a large piazza to the west side of the house in 1887. The house was inherited in 1924 by their daughter, Margaret Mulford Lothrop (1884-1970), who worked to preserve the house and opened it for tours. Margaret also wrote a book about the house, The Wayside: Home of Authors (1940). In the 1960s, the house became the first literary site to be acquired by the National Park Service.
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Babson-Alling House (1740)

by Dan//Colonial, Gloucester, Houses

The Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester purchased the Babson-Alling House in February 2019 and the historic home is currently undergoing restoration to become part of a new museum campus that will include a new storage and programming facility, slated to open in June 2020. Located at the modern address of 243/245 Washington Street, the house was built in 1740 by Joseph Allen (1681-1750) or his son, William Allen (1717-1815), at what was then the town center, called the Green, adjacent to the White-Ellery House, also owned by the museum. In 1765, William Allen sold the house to Isaac Smith (1719-1797), a wealthy Boston merchant and slave owner who was the uncle of Abigail Adams. Scipio Dalton was an enslaved person who is thought to have lived in the attic of the house. He eventually gained his freedom from Smith in 1783 after a period of indenture.

Smith sold the house in 1779 to John Low, Jr. (1754-1801), a merchant and lieutenant in the militia. The house passed to his daughter, Eliza Gorham Low (1786-1862), who married Nathaniel Babson (1784-1836), a merchant and ship captain, in 1809. The house was eventually inherited by their son Gustavus Babson (1820-1897). Most of his brothers became seafarers, but Gustavus was a successful farmer on the property. He married his first cousin, Susan Stanwood Low (1820-1880). Their daughter, Ann Prentiss Babson Alling, moved to the house after the death of her husband in 1894 and maintained the property with her brother Nathaniel. Her daughter, Elizabeth L. Alling, also lived in the house for many years. The house may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad before the Civil War.

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87 Middle Street, Gloucester (1785)

by Dan//Colonial, Gloucester, Houses

The house at 87 Middle Street in Gloucester (on the right in the image above) was built c. 1785 (or as early as 1718?). In this vicinity in colonial times (possibly where the building on the left, 18 Pleasant Street, stands today) was the well-known barber shop of Rebecca Broome Ingersoll. Her father, James Broome, was also a barber and ran a tavern in the 1750s and 1760s. As related in The Gloucester Book (1921), by Frank L. Cox,

In connection with the tavern he kept a barber shop and his daughter, Rebecca, who became an expert barber carried on the business in a shop at the corner of Pleasant and Middle streets. Her shop was for years the gathering place of all the wits and story tellers in the town. The tavern originally stood at 79 Middle street.

Rebecca Broome married Andrew Ingersoll. Their daughter Rebecca would eventually take over the business from her mother. As related by John J. Babson in his History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann (1860):

She was intelligent and lively; and through her intercourse from childhood with all classes of people, seamen and landmen, acquired a fund of information which made her a very agreeable talker. She last occupied an old house which stood on a lane leading from Front Street to the water-side; and many of our middle-aged people remember the attractions of pictures, birds, and anecdotes, which made the shop of “Aunt Becky” a place of the highest enjoyment in their youthful days.

According to an essay on the “Essex County Dialect” by Helen Mansfield that appeared in the Bulletin of the Essex Institute, Vol. 26, Nos. 7-12 (July-December 1894):

L and n were interchangeable, (m with them, to some extent; Tomlinson, Tumpleson, Tumblesome). Ingersoll was long Inkerson on Gloucester records, and seventy years ago the two forms were co-existent. “Aunt Becky Ingersoll,” a barber with a famous parrot, used to say, “Between Capt. Jack Ingersoll’ and the Inkersons about, there’s a difference.” (They were all of the same stock.) Any man now would sit on the capson of the wharf, instead of the capsill.