Issues → March/April 2007 → Home & Garden →

House For Sale: Cape Cod, Massaschusetts

Test: do you really want to live in an old house?

by The Moseyer

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Credit: Dan Cutrona

This historic West Brewster, Massachusetts, saltbox on the Old King's Highway sits on seven acres of land, complete with herring run, pond, and old stone walls. Outbuildings include a workshop, an antique barn, and a waterside shelter.

Wrought-iron hardware and hand-forged nails on this distressed wooden door show the soft patina of time—more than 280 years of service. The house was built in 1719 for descendants of Richard Sears, who had purchased the property from Alice Bradford on November 23, 1664, for £20. John Alden witnessed the transfer of the deed.

Brewster's "Ancient Sears Burying Ground" holds 124 family graves, including the unmarked resting place of Richard Sears.

If you answer yes to the following 10 questions, then do we ever have a Cape Cod gem for you!

The Quiz

1. Would you think that the lack of right angles throughout your old house is charming?

Yes No

2. Would you hate to replace old, bumpy horsehair plaster? Or old, worn fireplace bricks?

Yes No

3. How about those uneven distressed floorboards? Do you like them that way?

Yes No

4. Does the house's construction history interest you? On visiting an old house, do you want to see the cellar and attic first?

Yes No

5. Would you feel proud that the local historical commission so values your house that it prohibits most exterior alterations?

Yes No

6. Is it OK with you that the main staircase to the second floor is both steep and narrow?

Yes No

7. Would you value candle burn marks on the paneling over your living room fireplace?

Yes No

8. Would you be reluctant to cover wide floorboards with carpeting?

Yes No

9. Are you apt to notice and appreciate details such as wrought-iron door hinges, four-paneled walls, hand-planing marks on exposed corner posts, diamond-paned windows, etc.?

Yes No

10. Would you like feeling that you're sort of sharing your house with the many generations who have lived there before you?

Yes No

How did you do? "Yes" for all 10? Our own score turned out to be nine out of the 10, which is still probably OK because we truly do love 18th-century houses. (We wouldn't need to see the cellar and attic first.)

The "Cape Cod gem" to which we referred on the previous page is on a quiet, secluded seven acres off Route 6A in Brewster, Massachusetts, one of our favorite Cape Cod communities. Besides the 11-room, two-story saltbox, also on the property are a good-size workshop with lots of old tools; an antique barn, which serves as a garage; lovely lawns where sheep and goats once grazed; old trees and stone walls; a rushing brook that's an active annual herring run; and 700 feet of shore frontage on a pond, plus a sleeping shelter with woodstove and cot within a few feet of the water. Sound OK so far? But there's more.

Now owned by the town but once part of the property is a 1/3-acre cemetery with a hundred or more old headstones marking various members of the prominent Sears family, who built the house in 1719. They acquired this land in the 1660s from the widow and second wife of none other than Governor William Bradford, one of the founders of the first permanent English settlement in the Northeast (you know, the folks who sailed over here on the Mayflower in 1620 and hopped onto "the rock" in Plymouth). From the house, it's about a five-minute walk to the cemetery and brook on a wide, grassy, tree-lined path that was once Old County Way, an offshoot of the famous King's Highway back in Colonial days. Look sharp, as we did, and you'll spot a large metal ring embedded in one of the stone walls along the way. We wondered how many hundreds of horses had been hitched there over the span of those early years.

To get back to the main house, it has three nice, sunny bedrooms upstairs, plus two bathrooms, while the downstairs features the original parlor plus a large living room created from an 18th-century ell, complete with a huge reproduction Colonial brick fireplace (one of five fireplaces, three working). There's also a dining room, probably once the so-called "borning room" where Colonial babies came into the world; a fully equipped but rather plain kitchen; and several other rooms added to the original 1719 footprint that today comprises about 1,800 square feet. And all the interesting historical features we mentioned in our 10 questions are very much in evidence throughout these 11 rooms -- from the distressed floorboards to the lack of right angles to the candle burn marks over one of the fireplaces.