The House That Henry Built (Or Was It Elbridge?) (March 30, 2012)

We still can’t say for sure who built our house, but I’m homing in on Henry Dodge, father of Elbridge, Sr., as the most likely suspect—based on information from Historic New England, corroborated by the First Census of the United States, ordered in 1790 by then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.

HNE’s preliminary report on our house says it was “likely built ca. 1800,” according to the MA Historical Commission’s inventory—“a date which is consistent stylistically with the appearance and form of the house.” TTL-Architects, of Portland, ME, came to the same conclusion when they conducted the Building Conditions Survey for the state in 2006. Both say it was owned or built either by Henry, possibly around the time of his marriage in 1796, or, less likely, by his son Elbridge, Sr., in the 1830s.

Working backward, starting with what we know: Elbridge Dodge, Jr., owned the house in 1910 when Bradley Palmer bought it. From Census records, we know that Elbridge Jr. was born in 1831 to Elbridge Sr., who was born in 1802 to Henry Dodge in Hamilton. We found record that Henry sold his son Elbridge land in Hamilton in 1828 (History Detectives, Part II), but we haven’t found evidence that our house was on the property sold.

Hamilton has no record of our place. I like to think this gap in the documentation means the house predates the town, which didn’t incorporate until 1793. In various public records, Henry’s father is called “George Dodge of Hamilton,” but when Henry was born, in 1776, Hamilton wasn’t officially a town; it’s missing from the 1790 census, as it was still a part of Ipswich. That census does list Ipswich, with a resident named George Dodge who had a son the same age that Henry would have been at that time. Maybe our house fell into the same gap in the documentation because it was built before 1793, in what was then Ipswich?

Unfortunately, the Ipswich Historical Society has no real estate records from “the Hamlet,” as Hamilton was known before it was incorporated. The earliest Census records don’t list street addresses, so we can’t use them to trace exactly where George or Henry lived.

Historic New England classifies our house as Federal in style (above right, 1780–1820), but the exterior looks more like a Georgian Colonial (above left, 1725–1790), according to the HNE’s own illustrations, shown here, and 18th-century houses with plaques in Ipswich. This drawing of a Georgian shows a single chimney, but the HNE’s literature says double chimneys like ours became common toward the end of the Georgian period.

HNE is analyzing the architectural details in the oldest part of our house—the banisters, window muntins, doors, and latches—to help date the building. (From what I can tell, the details shown here corroborate the Federal-era classification.) All the Dodges I’ve described here were farmers, and Hamilton was rural then—not a hotbed of style or architectural invention. So the house could be Federal but look Georgian simply because it was behind the times, built in a cultural backwater. 

Besides HNE and the Salem Registry of Deeds, which I’ll revisit as soon as I can take a day off from work, we have one other resource to explore: The National Historical Geographic Information System, which merges all available aggregate U.S. census data. It looks daunting to navigate, but as I understand it, it will combine census data with available maps from the era, and maybe help us pin down exactly where these elusive Dodges lived.