INVENTORY FORM CONTINUATION SHEET Community Property
Bolton 96 Green Road
Capt. Jonas Houghton House
Massachusetts Historical Commission
Massachusetts Archives Building
220 Morrissey Boulevard
Boston, Massachusetts 02125 Area(s)
Form No.
156
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BY ANNE FORBES, CONSULTANT TO BOLTON HISTORICAL COMMISSION, APRIL 1998:
ASSESSOR'S PARCEL: 6B-14 ACREAGE: 1.68 acres FILM ROLL/NEGATIVE: VI-26
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION, cont.
Like many of Bolton's former farm properties, this one has been drastically reduced in size in the last several years. While the property still covered 63 acres in 1992, the house now sits on less than two acres in an area now completely subdivided, with modern houses standing just to the east and across the road. The land to the rear and west is still wooded. Since 1992 the porch that spanned the main facade has been removed, and vinyl siding installed on some of the exterior. The facade and east ell end, however, are clapboarded.
This is one of several eighteenth-century Cape Cod cottages in Bolton. It is a "three-quarter" house, four bays across the facade, and two- and three-bays on the gable ends, reflecting the two-room-deep plan. Two massive chimneys are located just behind the roof ridge. A complex of ells and additions includes a one-story rear ell that extends back from the northeast corner, to the end of which are attached a former shed extending east, and another ell extending west.
The windows of the house are small 6-over-6-sash, in flat, unadorned surrounds. The door is a modern steel 6-panel, but a leaded-light transom remains above it. An entry in the rear bay of the east end also has a modern 6-panel door, with a four-light transom retained. The facade of the northeast former shed(s) is fenestrated with two 6-over-6-sash windows, a modern door in an infill wall recessed under a former wagon opening, and a modern multi-light picture window in the east portion of the wall.
The large New England barn that formerly stood northeast of the house was knocked down in the hurricane of 1938.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE, cont.
Formerly called the Helen Woodbury House, recent research has led to a name change to the Capt. Jonas Houghton House. Capt. Jonas Houghton (1728-1801), believed to have inherited this house from his father, Jonas Houghton, was a Deacon in the Bolton church as well as a farmer and a soldier in the Revolution, and probably also in the French and Indian War. He and his first wife, Rebeckah, were married in about 1753. If Esther Whitcomb's estimate of a construction date of ca. 1760 is correct, then the senior Jonas Houghton would have built the house several years after his son's marriage. Capt. Jonas had at least nine children, and like many of Bolton's eighteenth-century farmers, he left his homestead, not to one of his older sons (see Form #263, 271 Vaughn Hill Road), but to his younger offspring. Eleazer (1776-1814) and Silas Houghton
(b. 1777), children of Capt. Jonas and his second wife, Lucy, who had died in 1794, inherited this property upon their father's death in 1801.
Eleazer soon obtained his brother's half, as well, and thus owned the whole house and farm until his untimely death in 1814. He had married Rebecca Barrett in 1804, and after he died the homestead was sold for the benefit of their children. It is not known who the purchaser was, but by 1831 the farm was owned by Town Treasurer Paul Whitcomb, (b. 1802). By 1837, however, he had moved to 50 Bare Hill Road (see Form 154). He had two wives, Sophia Nurse (Nourse) of Nourse Road, who died in 1830 at the age of 24, apparently from complications of childbirth, and Mary Mead of Harvard, whom he married the following year. In all, Paul Whitcomb had thirteen children.
The next owner may have been James Pierce, (1801-1872), who is shown as the owner in 1857. He and his wife had at least two children, James W. and Martha, who married Charles W. Nourse, whose father, Warren, had grown up on the nearby Nourse farm on Nourse Road. James Pierce's son, James W. Pierce (1839-1902), apparently took possession of the house after his father's death. In 1877 he sold part of his property to the town for the site of the new District #5 Schoolhouse, which was built just east of the house, at the corner of Vaughn Hill Road. (That schoolhouse was one of the three that were moved to the town center in the 1890's when the schools were consolidated). In the fashion of the turn of the century, Mr. Pierce gave the farm a name, "Brookdale Farm."
Everett Rowe purchased the farm a few years after James W. Pierce died.
BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Maps and atlases: 1831 (P. Whitcomb); 1857 (J. Pierce); 1870 (J. Pierce); 1898 (JW Pierce: "Brookdale Farm".
Whitcomb, E. About Bolton, 1988.
Bolton street directories (in The Hudson Directory).
Bolton vital records and cemetery records.
[ ] Recommended for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
If checked, you must attach completed National Register Criteria Statement form is attached.
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