History Detectives (December 22, 2011)

Today I met with Butch Crosbie of the Hamilton Historic Society, who helped me to start puzzling out when our house was built. The state survey that served as the basis of our restoration plan listed three possible dates—1860, 1830, and 1800. After months of studying the local architecture, we’ve ruled out the first two options, and we’re wondering if the house might actually predate Hamilton—which didn’t incorporate til 1793, though it was settled in the 17th century as part of Ipswich, where we have lived since September 2011. Ipswich has more 17th-century residential buildings than anywhere in the U.S., and plenty of gems from the 1700s and 1800s too; the houses most similar to ours were built in the late 18th century or early 19th—not even the 1830s, let alone 1860.

The state calls our place the Elbridge Francis Dodge house, after the man who lived there from 1872 to 1910, when Boston lawyer Bradley Palmer bought the land, which he would later bequeath to the state as part of a park bearing his name. Butch took me through some old maps, including this one from 1910 that clearly shows three Dodges on our stretch of Highland St., which takes a jag west after running north-south from Ipswich to Hamilton. Ours is the middle one, marked EF Dodge on the map. 

Beyond that point—moving both forward and backward in time—the documentation is murky if not absent. The historic society has one other map, from 1872, but the markings are unclear. For most of the 20th century, the house sat in a state park, so the Hamilton tax assessor doesn’t have records of its occupants. Butch told me about two local women who would have visited the house in the 1950s; I’ll definitely pay each of them a visit and write of my findings. For the earliest history, however, we have another important stop to make: the Salem Registry of Deeds, with records of every real estate transaction in Essex County since its earliest settlement in the 1600s.