Built around 1810 in the Federal style, the North Center School is a one-room schoolhouse that originally stood in Whately. It was moved to the Eastern States Exposition grounds to become part of Storrowton. The entryway of the building was modified to resemble one in the Federal style, as seen on a schoolhouse in Vergennes, Vermont (since moved to the Shelburne Museum), by Storrowtown’s benefactor, Helen O. Storrow.
Captain John Potter built his house in North Brookfield, at the corner of South Main and Ward Streets, in 1776. Potter was a clockmaker and craftsman who also served as a captain in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. His mansion, which Potter built with his own hands, was started just before and completed just after the interruption of the war. It was constructed around Potter’s earlier house and features a faux-masonry exterior, actually made of wood. The house also had a large room for dancing on the second floor and a support pole was used in the dining room below whenever the upper room was used for dancing! Later, the Captain’s son, F.A. Potter, ran a shop attached to the house. In 1929, the Potter House, which had passed out of the Potter family’s hands in 1920, was moved to Storrowton, the recreation of a classic New England village, as imagined by benefactor Helen O. Storrow, at the Eastern States Exposition grounds in West Springfield. It is now open to the public for tours.
The first of the state pavilion buildings constructed as part of the Eastern States Exposition’s “Avenue of States” was the Massachusetts Building, dedicated in 1919 by then governor Calvin Coolidge. The building, designed by architect James H. Ritchie, is a replica of the Old State House in Boston.
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.
Designed by the famous builder and wood carver, Samuel McIntire, the Clifford Crowninshield House is an impressive Federal style mansion on the southeast corner of Salem Common. The house was built 1804-1806 for the merchant, Clifford Crowninsheld, who died in 1809. In 1802, the Minerva, a ship owned by Crowninshield and Nathaniel West, was the first Salem vessel to circumnavigate the globe. The house was next occupied by Crowninshield’s sister, Sarah, and her husband, James Devereux. In 1799, Devereux was captain of the Franklin when it became the first American vessel to trade with Japan. Devereux returned from Nagasaki with a variety of items, some of which are now in the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. On June 23, 1800, Rev. William Bentley visited Devereux’s (earlier) house in Salem, where the captain “exhibited such things as engaged his attention,” including “Stone Tables, Tea Tables, Servers, Knife Cases, Small Cabinets,” and paintings. Bentley observed that the “stuffed gowns, which on both sides silk, are filled with a very fine cotton, were luxuries.” The house was later inherited by Devereux’s daughter, Abigail, who had married Captain William Dean Waters. In 1892, the Crowninshield-Devereux-Waters House was altered by its then owner, Zina Goodell, a successful Salem businessman, who had begun as a blacksmith and machinist. Before 1892, the house had been like many such Federal structures in Salem, in which, according to The Colonial Architecture of Salem, by Frank Cousins and Phil M. Riley, “a wing extended to one side of the main house along the street, instead of an L projecting from the rear, and thus by greatly elongating the oblong arrangement reduced in a measure the apparent height of a three-story structure.” Goodell, not finding the “ell” “good,” moved it from the side to the rear of the house, “about doubling the depth of the building.” He also moved the house closer to the corner of Forrester Street (the house’s address is on Washington Square East).
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.
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.
