Tag: Gambrel

William Cullen Bryant Homestead (1785)

by Dan//Colonial, Cummington, Houses, Italianate, Victorian Eclectic

William Cullen Bryant Homestead

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) was a major poet and for 50 years was editor and publisher of The New York Evening Post. He was born in a log cabin in Cummington. When he was two, Bryant‘s father, Dr. Peter Bryant, moved the family to a house in Cummington that the doctor’s father-in-law had built in circa 1783-1785. The house became young William Cullen Bryant‘s boyhood home and is now called the William Cullen Bryant Homestead. In 1865, after the old farmhouse had been out of the family for 30 years, Bryant purchased and extensively altered it in to reflect Victorian stylistic tastes. He began by raising the original section of the house, creating a new ground floor. He also added a gambrel-roofed study, a replica of his father’s medical office, which projects from the front facade, and constructed an addition to the house’s original rear ell. The renovated house would serve as his summer home until his death. It is now owned by the Trustees of Reservations and can be toured by the public. Continue reading “William Cullen Bryant Homestead (1785)”

Sessions House (1710)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Northampton

Sessions House is a colonial residence at 109 Elm Street in Northampton that is now used as a Smith College dormitory. It was built around 1710 (or perhaps as early as 1700) by Captain Jonathan Hunt (1665-1738) and was the first house in Northampton to be built outside the early settlement’s protective stockade. The house has a staircase that was originally designed as a secret passageway for the family to hide in during Native American raids. The house passed to the Henshaw family by marriage and was later owned by other families. Eventually, around 1900, it passed to Mrs. Ruth Huntington Sessions, who ran it as off campus housing for Smith College students. Born in Cambridge in 1859, Ruth Huntington moved with her parents to Syracuse, New York when her father, Frederic Dan Huntington, became Episcopal Bishop of Central New York. In 1880, her family sent her to Europe, where she studied piano under Clara Schumann. In 1887 she married Archibald Lowery Sessions and moved with him to New York City. A social activist and writer (her memoir, Sixty Odd: A Personal History, was published in 1936), Sessions (d. 1946) spent her summers at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House in Hadley, given to her by her father, and her winters in Northampton. She sold the Northampton house to Smith College in 1921. Continue reading “Sessions House (1710)”

Landlord Fowler Tavern (1761)

by Dan//Colonial, Taverns, Westfield

Built around 1761 (perhaps as early as 1755), the Landlord Fowler Tavern is located at 171 Main Street in Westfield. Daniel Fowler was granted a tavern license in 1761 and the building continued to function as an inn until the 1830s. At the start of the American Revolution, Daniel Fowler served on the Committee of Correspondence, which met at the tavern. As related in The Westfield Jubilee (1870):

It is said that General Burgoyne, when he passed through this town as a prisoner from the field of Saratoga, spent the night at this tavern, and with true military politeness, kissed the wife of the landlord, on the morning of his departure.

Another prisoner of war to stay in the house during the Revolutionary War was Hessian commander General Friedrich von Riesdesel. H. C. Schaeffer owned the property between 1885 and 1916, during which time he conducted a cigar-making business on the premises. More recently, the former tavern has been restored and converted into apartments. The Fowler Tavern‘s original Connecticut River Valley broken scroll pediment doorway was removed in 1920 by Wallace Nutting and placed in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The current doorway on the building is a replica.

Thomas Smith House (1757)

by Dan//Agawam, Colonial, Houses

Built c. 1757, the Thomas Smith House stands at 251 North West Street in the Feeding Hills section of Agawam. Thomas Smith was born in Suffield (now in Connecticut, but then in Massachusetts) in 1725, married Esther Ball in 1755, and died in 1814. The house, previously known as the Matthew Noble House (Noble, one of Agawam’s earliest settlers, first owned the land on which the house was built), was purchased by the Agawam Historical Association in 2002. Remarkable for the fact that it has not been significantly altered since it built, the Association has restored (pdf) the the house with funding from the Agawam Community Preservation Act. It is now a living history house museum.

Hearth and Eagle House (1750)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Marblehead

In the 1940s, historical novelist Anya Seton‘s research into her ancestry led her to Marblehead, and she based her 1948 novel, The Hearth and Eagle, on the history of the seaside town. She set the novel in the Hearth and Eagle Inn, based on the house at 30 Franklin Street in Marblehead. The house was built c. 1715-1721 by the father of Elbridge Gerry and was enlarged in 1750. It was owned by the captain in command of Fort Sewall during the War of 1812 and soldiers were billeted in the house.