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INVENTORY FORM CONTINUATION SHEET Community Property
Bolton 610 Sugar Road
Massachusetts Historical Commission
Massachusetts Archives Building
220 Morrissey Boulevard
Boston, Massachusetts 02125 Area(s)
P Form No.
113; 200
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BY ANNE FORBES, CONSULTANT TO BOLTON HISTORICAL COMMISSION, MARCH 1998:
ASSESSOR'S PARCEL: 5E-24 ACREAGE: 1.52 acres FILM ROLL/NEGATIVES: IV-25; V-2
ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION, cont.
Although the Longley House today has one rear chimney and a small, slightly off-center chimney at the main ridge, it is likely that in the mid-eighteenth century this was a classic 2 1/2-story center-chimney Georgian farmhouse. Typically, it is a one-room-deep, five- by one-bay building. The windows, undoubtedly later than the original period of the house, are largely 6-over-6-sash (several with recent replacements) in wide, molded surrounds. Other architectural trim is extremely simple, including narrow cornerboards, and a roof cornice without overhang at the end, and no frieze at the top of the wall. The main entry is a modern colonial type arrangement of a four-panel door with four lights across the top, narrow sidelights under an incised fan, and narrow pilaster-like boards.
Abutting the east end of the main building is a two-part 1 1/2-story wing. Its inner section has a centered, shed-roofed wall dormer with paired 6-over-6-sash, and a modern "farmer's porch" across the front. The outer section has a four-bay, one-story section, with a high, wide gable-front second-story set back from the first story wall plane. In the gable is a triple 6-over-6-sash window with a wide, square-cornered fanlight above. A modern exterior brick chimney abuts the east end of the ell.
Standing just east of the house is a well-preserved vertical-board New England barn (#200) with a metal roof, its main sliding wagon door in the west gable-end, facing toward the house. An unusual survival is the configuration of the east end of the barn. Clearly an exit for empty hay wagons, the doorway here is much lower than the one on the west, and the ramp the wagons descended, supported by a fieldstone retaining wall, now ends at a high stockade fence on the sideline of the property. Fieldstone walls also still delineate what appears to have been a small barnyard between the barn and the road.
Much of the farmland along this section of Sugar Road has been subdivided for houselots since 1970, and large modern woodframe houses on fairly large parcels now make up a significant part of the area's setting. Even this parcel, which then measured 7 3/4 acres, has been reduced to just 1.52 acres around the house, and several new houses built on the remainder.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE, cont.
Col. Robert Longley (1731(2)-1802), apparently the first owner of this house, had achieved the rank of Captain by 1776, when he raised a company that was to see action at the Battle of Bunker Hill in the early days of the Revolution.
After the war, he was one of several church members whose signing of the covenant in 1783 marked the reconciliation between the followers of the Rev. Thomas Goss and those of the Rev. John Walley, who had replaced the Rev. Goss in the Bolton church ten years earlier. He was active in civil town affairs, as well, especially in regard to the schools. In 1792 he was on the committee charged with disposing of one of the old schoolhouses, and in 1796 served on the committee for "everedging" the terms of the schools in the various parts of town. Like many Bolton farmers, Col. Longley pursued other local trades as well as farming. He was a cooper, and apparently a carpenter, for in 1788 he was paid for building the new pair of stocks to be erected on the town common. He also operated a small brick-making operation, as in 1788-1790 he
is listed as furnishing nearly half the bricks for the chimney of the new northeast schoolhouse (later School #4). The latter reference is intriguing as a clue to where one of Bolton's several late-eighteenth-century brickyards may have been. (The other bricks in the chimney came from Oliver Barrett of Long Hill Road.)
The dispersal of Col. Longley's farm after his death in 1802 illustrates one relatively common pattern of inheritance in Massachusetts' older rural communities at the turn of the nineteenth century. Contrary to popular assumption, a farm was not necessarily passed to the eldest son. Land shortages, a desire for independence, and the call of adventure and opportunity often combined to influence members of the younger generation to establish new farms elsewhere, as was the case with two of the Colonel's sons, Eli and Jonathan, who removed to Waterford, Maine. There Eli acquired roles that would never have been possible for him in Bolton--he became Waterford's first Town Treasurer and Postmaster, ran its first store and first tavern, and built the first potash works. Another son had died, and consequently the family farm passed to one of
the youngest siblings, Robert Longley, Jr. Even he felt the call of the frontier, however, and shortly after his mother died in 1815, he sold the farm, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, and their six children moved to Kentucky. His motivation is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that his brother, Jonathan, and his family, who had since moved from Maine to Kentucky, had been massacred there in an Indian uprising.
Thus the farm at 610 Sugar Road passed out of the Longley family. Further research will be required to identify all its subsequent owners, but it appears to have changed hands several times during the rest of the nineteenth century. By 1831 it belonged to L. Whitney, by 1857 to C. Thwing, in 1870 to W. Knox. By 1898, this farm and the two to the west had been acquired by some of the many Irish-born farmers who had immigrated to Bolton in the third and fourth quarters of the century. The owner of this one, which then measured sixty acres, was John Haggerty, apparently a relative of William Haggerty of 588 Sugar Road (See Form #112). In 1918, the property was bought by Henry Tervo, whose family members subsequently owned it for over sixty years.
BIBLIOGRAPHY and/or REFERENCES
Maps and atlases: 1831 (L. Whitney); 1857 (C. Thwing); 1870 (W. Knox); 1898 (M. Haggerty).
Whitcomb, E. About Bolton, 1988.
Bolton street directories (in The Hudson Directory).
Bolton Historical Society file for 550 Sugar Road.
Bolton town 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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