Category: Colonial

Henry Vassall House (1746)

by Dan//Cambridge, Colonial, Houses

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The oldest part of the Henry Vassall House, on Brattle Street in Cambridge, may date to as early as 1636, although the date usually given today is 1746. In that year, the property was sold by John Vassall Sr., who had purchased it in 1737, to his younger brother Henry Vassall. John Vassall’s son, Maj. John Vassall, built the nearby Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House. Henry Vassall was a loyalist at the time of the Revolutionary War and the Vassall House is one of several homes belonging to loyalists along the section of Brattle Street known as Tory Row. These homes were either sold by their owners or seized during the Revolution. Vassall had died in 1769 and in 1775, his widow, Penelope Royall Vassall, fled to Boston and then to her estates in Antigua. According to the Historic Guide to Cambridge (1907):

“Just before sailing Madam Vassall petitioned the Provincial Congress, then sitting at Watertown, that she might be allowed to take with her some of her effects. Congress permitted her to take anything that she wanted except “provisions and her medicine chest.” The estate was not confiscated, as it belonged to a widow who had taken no active part against the patriots.”

The Continental Army at the time had only one other medicine chest besides the one in the Vassall House. “From these two all the regimental surgeons had to supply their needs. The fact that the medicines were here, and that there were twenty available rooms, besides halls and out-houses, may have been the reason that this house became the medical headquarters.” In 1775, Dr. Benjamin Church, who was effectively the first Surgeon General of the U.S. Army, was found to be sending secret letters to the British Commander, General Thomas Gage. Convicted of “communicating with the enemy,” Dr. Church was held for a time in the Vassall House as a prisoner. The house has remained a private home, with a number of alterations and additions being made to it over the years.

Jonathan Corwin House (1675)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Salem

The Jonathan Corwin House, also known as the Witch House, is a seventeenth century home located on Essex Street in Salem. When Jonathan Corwin, a merchant, purchased the property in 1675, there was already a partially completed timber frame, left unfinished after being started some years earlier (older estimates put the construction date as 1642). Corwin completed the construction and moved in with his family in 1679. As a prominent citizen of Salem, Corwin served as a magistrate and was a judge during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The Corwin family owned the house into the nineteenth century, during which time a number of alterations were made to the home. In 1856, it was bought by a pharmacist, George Farrington, who built his shop onto one side of the building. He referred to the home as the “Witch House” and attracted tourists with his claims that the Witch Trials had occurred in the parlor. By the twentieth century, the house was being used for a shop, businesses and apartments. Threatened with demolition to accommodate the widening of North Street, Historic Salem Inc was established to return the house to a seventeenth century look and move it to the west. Given to the town, the Witch House first opened as a museum in 1946.

Jonathan Hoyt House (1755)

by Dan//Colonial, Deerfield, Houses

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Built around 1755, in the Cheapside section of Deerfield, the Jonathan Hoyt House was once the home of Rev. Henry Colman, a prominent agriculturalist. Colman had become an ordained minister, but ill health forced him to retire as a pastor. He devoted himself to agriculture, in the 1830s purchasing the Hoyt Farm and the White Horse Inn, as the Hoyt House had come to be called. Later, the house was moved to Greenfield, but in 1965-1966, at the urging of John Radovich, who had grown up in the house, the building was moved to the Street in Old Deerfield and restored in the Colonial Revival style to serve as a parsonage for the First Church of Deerfield.

The Manse [Deerfield Academy] (1768)

by Dan//Colonial, Deerfield, Houses

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The building in Old Deerfield known as the Manse, or the Willard House, is a 1768 Georgian mansion that was at one time the home of Rev. Samuel Willard. An earlier house, constructed in 1694, was already on the lot when the land was sold by Samuel Allen, the grandfather of Ethan Allen, to Samuel Barnard of Salem. Barnard bequeathed the land to his nephew, Joseph Barnard, who built the Manse in 1768, spending thirteen years selecting wood without knots. The earlier gambrel roofed building became the current ell. The Barnards continued to live in the house until 1795 when, facing financial difficulties, Samuel Barnard moved his family to Vermont. In 1807, the house was rented to Hosea Hildreth, preceptor at Deerfield Academy, whose son Richard Hildreth, later author of a well-known History of the United States, was born in the house. In 1811, the house was bought by Rev. Samuel Willard, who had already been living there since 1807 and would own the house until his death in 1859. Dr. Willard was the first Unitarian minister in Western Massachusetts and entertained such visitors as Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the house. Willard’s heirs sold the home in 1885 and it had other owners. Today it serves as the residence of the Head of School of Deerfield Academy.
Edit (01/24/2011): A book about the house was published in 1887, Story of the Old Willard House of Deerfield, Mass., by Catharine B. Yale.

Rev. Jonathan Ashley House (1734)

by Dan//Colonial, Deerfield, Houses

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Rev. Jonathan Ashley was the second minister in Deerfield, serving from 1712 to 1780. He married Dorothy Williams, the daughter of the Rev. William Williams of Hatfield. Given a home lot in town, he constructed his house around 1734. Originally having a center chimney, the house was modified by Ashley in the 1750s into a center hallway home with a distinctive Connecticut River Valley doorway. As one of the elite Valley citizens known as “River Gods,” Ashley installed fine paneling in his home and furnished it with high style furniture. By the twentieth century, the house had been moved back on the lot and replaced with a nineteenth century Italianate style house. The former “mansion house” was now used as a tobacco barn. It was restored (the current doorway is a reproduction) and moved back to a position in the Street by the founders of Historic Deerfield, Henry and Helen Flynt. In 1948, the house became their first restoration opened to the public. It currently houses an extensive collection of Connecticut River Valley antiques.

John Nims House (1744)

by Dan//Colonial, Deerfield, Houses

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The ancestor of the Nims family in America, Godfrey Nims, a cordwainer, arrived in Deerfield around 1670. The current Nims House in Old Deerfield is the third to be built on the site. The first was constructed by Godfrey Nims around 1685. This house burned in the 1704 French and Indian raid and was rebuilt by John Nims in 1710. This second structure may have been added as an ell to the third and current house, built around 1744 (1740-1750) (this ell was significantly altered around 1808). The house served as a Post Office from 1816 to 1831. The property went out of the family in the 1890s, but was bought by two Nims descendants in 1936, who deeded it to Deerfield Academy in 1938. The house has since been used as a dormitory and faculty residence. There is HABS documentation on this house.

Sycamores (1788)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, South Hadley

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Colonel Benjamin Ruggles Woodbridge, of South Hadley, was a physician, merchant, entrepreneur and politician, who led a regiment at Bunker Hill and was a representative to the General Court. In 1788, Col. Woodbridge built his house on Woodbridge Street in South Hadley. After his death, in 1819, the house became the Woodbridge Scientific School for boys. It was later owned by the Montague family and was purchased, in 1900, by Rose Hollingsworth, who had the (recently restored) Water Tower on the property constructed. For much of the twentieth century, the house served as a dormitory for students at Mount Holyoke College. Having fallen into disrepair, in 1996 it was purchased by the Sycamores Committee of the South Hadley Historical Society, who are restoring the house to become a museum. In 2004, the 1733 Rawson House, home of South Hadley‘s first minister, Grindall Rawson, which originally stood on the Sycamores property, was donated to the Sycamore Committee. It was then moved to its current location, attached to Sycamore‘s rear ell.