Tag: Gambrel

Staples-Hutton House (1805)

by Dan//Colonial Revival, Concord, Houses, Queen Anne

The house at 215 Lexington Road in Concord has undergone a great deal of change over the centuries. The origins of the house lie in a two-story building known as the Old Gun House that once stood on Bedford Street near the center of town. It was built c. 1805 to house the two brass cannons of the Concord Artillery, which had been authorized the previous year. Sometime in the 1860s, developer Samuel Staples (1813-1895) moved the building to the current property on Lexington Road. In the 1840s he had served as the town jailer and in 1846 had jailed Henry David Thoreau for a night for nonpayment of his poll tax. Staples remodeled the former armory as his residence and lived in it for about ten years. In 1883, Benjamin H. Hutton, or Huttman (?), of New York purchased the house for himself and his family and soon after acquired the house at 201 Lexington Road, where his brother-in-law would live for some years. Huttman hired architect John Chapman to expand remodel both homes in the Queen Anne style. The family later had financial troubles and the house was sold at auction about 1911-1912. It was bought by Philip Flavin, a dentist who converted the building into a double house.

Hardy-Parsons House (1764)

by Dan//Colonial, Gloucester, Houses

Hardy-Parsons House

The Hardy-Parsons House at 90 Middle Street in Gloucester was built in 1764 (according to a historic marker on the house) by Capt. William Dolliver, a mariner. The Hardy family occupied the house for many years and, at some point, Judy Millett had a school for small children in the west room of the house. In the mid-twentieth century the house was occupied by Samuel H. Mansfield and his wife, Carrie Esther Parsons Mansfield. They collected works by artist Fitz Henry Lane that are now in the Cape Ann Museum. In 1948, Mrs. Mansfield left the house to the Cape Ann Historical Association. It is now privately owned.

Charles Olson, the poet and resident of Gloucester who railed against the destruction of old buildings wrought by urban renewal, references the Hardy-Parsons House in “Maximus, to Gloucester: Letter 2,” as “the house the street cuts off.” (see also “A Scream to the Editor“).

Joseph Foster House (1760)

by Dan//Colonial, Gloucester, Houses

Erected circa 1760, the gambrel roof house at 75 Middle Street in Gloucester was the home of a merchant and Revolutionary War patriot named Joseph Foster (1730-1804). Originally from Ipswich, he became a ship captain, trading with the West Indies. He commanded privateers during the war and was a member of the Committee of Correspondence and the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1779-1780.

At the start of the Revolutionary War, Foster was a hero of the Battle of Gloucester. On August 8, 1775, the Bristish sloop HMS Falcon, commanded by Capt. John Linzee, attacked two American schooners heading for Salem. He captured one, but the other escaped to Gloucester harbor and was grounded near Five Pound Island. Capt. Linzee sent barges with men to seize the grounded vessel, but local defenders, Joseph Foster playing a conspicuous part among them, fired on the British and effectively trapped them. In an attempt to distract the townspeople and relieve pressure on his men, Linzee fired Falcon‘s guns on the town of Gloucester, hitting the steeple of the First Church meeting house. He also sent a landing party to set fire to the town, but his men were captured by the locals. He then sent in his captured schooner, but its crewmen revolted and seized the ship. Linzee sailed off on the Falcon.

As related in The grandchildren of Col. Joseph Foster (1885), quoting from Babson’s History of the Town of Gloucester, Cape Ann:

It was in 1779, a “period of great poverty” in Gloucester, when paper money had “depreciated to about one-seventieth of its nominal value,” and “about one-sixth of the whole population were” “living chiefly upon charity,” “that a large troop of women, in want of the necessaries of life, marched to Col. Foster’s store, and made known their determination to supply themselves with provisions and groceries from his stock, in spite of all resistance. Some of the number were prepared to take an exact account of the articles delivered to each person, with reference to payment, if they should ever he able to pay; but, pay or no pay, they would have them, and proceeded to help themselves accordingly. This merchant was one of the most ardent patriots of the town; and it is related of him, that his conduct on this occasion proved him to be one of the most benevolent: for the tale of suffering and destitution that the women had to tell so touched his feelings, that he liberally supplied their wants, and dismissed them with words of the utmost kindness and sympathy ”

After the war, Capt. Foster returned to his farm. The house in town remained in the family until 1859. Since then it has had a number of owners and gone through alterations, serving at different times as a dry goods store, a piano and sweing machine shop, a confectionery shop, the Trust Department of the Cape Ann Bank & Trust Company, and now as offices.

The Manse, Northampton (1744)

by Dan//Colonial, Houses, Northampton

The Manse

The Manse is a house at 54 Prospect Street in Northampton. It was built in 1744 (or as early as 1737?) on the foundation of the original 1684 parsonage house of Rev. Solomon Stoddard, Northampton’s second minister and the grandfather of Jonathan Edwards. The original house passed to Rev. Stoddard’s son, Colonel John Stoddard, who built the current house. Col. Stoddard negotiated the return of the captives taken to Canada from the Deerfield Raid of 1704. The Stoddard family owned the house until 1812. A later resident was Josiah Gilbert Holland, an editor of the Springfield Republican and a founder and editor of Scribner’s Monthly. Holland also wrote novels, poetry and such non-fiction works as a History of Western Massachusetts (1855) and an influential biography of Abraham Lincoln, published in 1866. He and his wife Elizabeth were also friends and frequent corespondents of Emily Dickinson. The house’s cupola is a mid-nineteenth-century addition. The house was an inn for a time in the twentieth century.

Meetinghouse, Hancock Shaker Village (1793)

by Dan//Churches, Colonial, Hancock

The Meetinghouse, Hancock Shaker Village

The original Meetinghouse at Hancock Shaker Village was built in 1786. To gain more space, its first roof, a gambrel, was altered to a gable roof in 1871. By the late nineteenth century, the Shakers primarily used the meeting room in the Brick Dwelling for worship services. In the early twentieth century the Meetinghouse was being used for storage. It was taken down in 1938. In 1962, after Hancock Shaker Village became a museum, it acquired the Meetinghouse from the former Shaker Village in Shirley. The Shirley Meetinghouse was then moved to Hancock. Built in 1793 by by Moses Johnson, who had constructed the Hancock Meetinghouse (among many others), the Shirley Meetinghouse is the only eighteenth-century Shaker Meetinghouse to remain unaltered in its original firm.