NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK NOMINATION NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 QUINCY HOMESTEAD Page 1 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 1. NAME OF PROPERTY Historic Name: Quincy Homestead Other Name/Site Number: Dorothy Quincy House 2. LOCATION Street & Number: 34 Butler Road Not for publication: City/Town: Quincy Vicinity: State: Massachusetts County: Norfolk Code: 025 Zip Code: 02169-2212 3. CLASSIFICATION Ownership of Property Category of Property Private: Building(s): X Public-Local: District: Public-State: X Site: Public-Federal: Structure: Object: Number of Resources within Property Contributing Noncontributing 1 1 buildings sites structures objects 1 1 Total Number of Contributing Resources Previously Listed in the National Register: 1 Name of Related Multiple Property Listing: Quincy Multiple Resource Area (1991) NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 QUINCY HOMESTEAD Page 2 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 4. STATE/FEDERAL AGENCY CERTIFICATION As the designated authority under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, I hereby certify that this ____ nomination ____ request for determination of eligibility meets the documentation standards for registering properties in the National Register of Historic Places and meets the procedural and professional requirements set forth in 36 CFR Part 60. In my opinion, the property ____ meets ____ does not meet the National Register Criteria. Signature of Certifying Official Date State or Federal Agency and Bureau In my opinion, the property ____ meets ____ does not meet the National Register criteria. Signature of Commenting or Other Official Date State or Federal Agency and Bureau 5. NATIONAL PARK SERVICE CERTIFICATION I hereby certify that this property is: ___ Entered in the National Register ___ Determined eligible for the National Register ___ Determined not eligible for the National Register ___ Removed from the National Register ___ Other (explain): Signature of Keeper Date of Action NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 QUINCY HOMESTEAD Page 3 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form 6. FUNCTION OR USE Historic: Domestic Sub: Single Dwelling Current: Recreation and culture Sub: Museum 7. DESCRIPTION ARCHITECTURAL CLASSIFICATION: Colonial: Post-medieval: or First Period as it is referred to in New England Colonial: Georgian Late Victorian: Second Empire Late 19th and 20th Century Revivals: Colonial Revival: Georgian Revival MATERIALS: Foundation: Stone (granite) Walls: wood (clapboard/weatherboard and shingles) Roof: wood (shingles) and metal (raised seam metal roof) Other: brick (chimneys) NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 QUINCY HOMESTEAD Page 4 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form Describe Present and Historic Physical Appearance. The Quincy Homestead is situated in a mixed residential/commercial/urban setting less than one mile from the center of the commercial and administrative center of the City of Quincy. The house is sited on a 1.8 acre lot close to the intersection of two major thoroughfares: Hancock Street, which was elevated about eight feet in the late nineteenth century behind a stone retaining wall that forms the property’s western boundary; and the Furnace Brook Parkway, which is located less than one hundred yards to the north. Butler Road forms the southern boundary of the property, Furnace Brook forms the northern boundary, and a lot occupied by a twentieth century apartment building forms the eastern boundary. This small parcel, which contains the dwelling house of the Upper Farm and the seat of three generations of Edmund Quincys and their families, is the remnant of a much larger estate numbering more than 400 acres. Considered the grandest estate in Quincy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it originally extended eastward to Quincy Bay and northward for more than a mile, and included three farms with open fields, orchards, numerous farm buildings, fresh and salt meadows, pastureland, a tidal mill, and saltworks (Figure 1). The property passed from Quincy family ownership in 1763, when the Upper Farm of approximately 250 acres was sold by the estate of Edward Jackson (1708-1757), brother-in-law and former business partner of Edmund Quincy IV (1703-1788). By the late nineteenth century the property, although reduced to approximately twenty acres in size, was still operated as a gentleman’s farm (Figures 2 and 3). It was not until the late 1880s that this parcel and surrounding lands were subdivided and developed for residential use and the farm buildings destroyed (Figures 4 and 5). The present 1.8 acre parcel was delineated in 1890 (Figure 6) and again in 1903 (Figure 7) shortly before its purchase by the National Society of Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (NSCDA-MA).1 The property is enclosed by an iron picket fence on its west and south sides. This fence was erected in 1953 by the Metropolitan District Commission, now the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), after the 1904 design of historic architect Joseph Everett Chandler (Figure 8). The property today is open lawn with a paved driveway at the rear entering from Butler Road and has two ornamental gardens bordered with boxwoods in front (west) and to the south of the house. The front garden was created in 1994 following photographic, cartographic, and painted images of the gardens from as early as 1822 (Figures 2, 6, 7, and 10). Presently the parcel is occupied by two structures: the Quincy Homestead, and a small, twentieth century storage building (non-contributing structure). This latter structure is located about fifty feet to the rear or east of the house, and separated from the house by an asphalt-paved driveway and parking area (Figure 9). It was built for the Colonial Dames in two phases and serves as a storage building and shelter/exhibition building for a vehicle that was owned by John Hancock 1 In 1904 when the parcel was purchased by the locally organized Society of Colonial Dames, they were called the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America on the deed from Rev. Daniel M. Wilson (Norfolk County Land Records, Vol. 974, pg. 178 – hereafter written as NCLR 974/178). In 1956 the name of the Society was changed to the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. For a more detailed history of the Massachusetts Society, see Pauline DeFriez Gray, “History of the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1893-1968,” Register of the National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1968, 44- 53. See Appendix I for a detailed chronology of ownership of the property. NPS Form 10-900 USDI/NPS NRHP Registration Form (Rev. 8-86) OMB No. 1024-0018 QUINCY HOMESTEAD Page 5 United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (1737-1793), Massachusetts patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence and husband to Dorothy Quincy (1747-1830), the daughter of Edmund Quincy IV, who was the last of the Quincys to own and occupy the house. This enclosed vehicle, called a “booby hut”, was able to operate as a four-wheeled carriage or on sleigh runners. It is a remarkable survivor that has undergone little or no restoration and replacement of its eighteenth century furnishings, upholstery, trimmings, etc. Exterior The Quincy Homestead is deeply sited away from Hancock Street behind several hundred feet of lawn and gardens. The large, two-story house presents a Georgian façade with Georgian detailing beneath a large gambrel roof, but it is truly an amalgam of eighteenth and nineteenth century additions to a late seventeenth century core. The house underwent several phases of restoration/rehabilitation during the twentieth century that removed some but not all of the mid- to late-nineteenth century additions and reconstructed missing features from the eighteenth century (Figures 11, 12, 13, and 14).2 The main block of the house consists of a two-story, single-pile, central passage house. A gambrel roof covers the building and is ornamented with a balustrade with turned balusters and posts that crosses the roof at the break in the slopes and rises to the ridge along the northern edge of the roof. At the south end of the building the gambrel roof makes a right angle to the east and covers a large two-story ell that is one room deep and two rooms wide. The entire structure is covered with clapboards and trimmed with narrow corner boards. While the clapboards are painted yellow, the corner boards, window frames, doorways, cornice, and balustrade are painted in pleasantly contrasting white, topped by the grayish-brown color of the wood-shingle roof. The principal elevation presents a symmetrical five-bay façade with a central entry through a restored mid to late-eighteenth century frontispiece consisting of a triangular pediment with pulvinated frieze and supported by two fluted pilasters flanking the single-leaf door (Figure 15). Three dormers are symmetrically situated on the lower roof slope; the central dormer has a segmental arch pediment, while the two outer dormers are topped with triangular pediments. This arrangement of dormer pediments, along with the gambrel roof with balustrade, is reminiscent of the Hancock House in Boston (erected 1737, removed 1868) and the arrangement found at the McPhaedris-Warner House in Portsmouth, NH (NHL, 1960), as well as at numerous other stylish houses in the region that were erected or improved in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.