Careswell

In 1790 the doctor and his family finally moved into the old Winslow mansion. Troubles, however, were not over. His wife Elizabeth died in 1801 (in 1805 he married Frances Gay [1763-1846]). The estate had been divided, leaving him less land for cash crops. Medicine was changing and practices of older physicians such as bleeding were being called into question. Also, Isaac may have squandered money remodeling the house, either when he moved in, or when he remarried. By the time he died in 1819 he was more than twenty thousand dollars in debt. In 1827, to settle the debt, the Careswell estate and mansion were sold out of the family. [13]

In 1836 the part of the estate with the mansion was purchased by Senator Daniel Webster (1782-1852), "the Farmer of Marshfield." Webster occupied the old Thomas house next door and used the Careswell land for crops, but his use of the venerable Winslow house remains unclean. In October 1842 it was reported that the "Winslow Mansion, which was built one hundred and forty-seven years ago, is still standing on the premises, in a pretty good state of preservation, bearing, however, the visible marks of time." [14] Webster sold Careswell in 1855 and it passed through a number of owners over the next half century. Webster's small, freestanding law office was moved onto the Historic Winslow House grounds in 1965.

In 1919 three pioneer preservationists--Edward C. Ford, John Gutterson, and Edgar B. Sherrill--purchased the derelict Winslow house from Oscar Weston and deeded it to a newly created Historic Winslow House Association, which still administers it today. Weston had lived in the house and used the ell as a barn. Fifty truckloads of manure had to be removed from the building, and there are still dents in the flooring of the summer kitchen attributed to goats that were kept there. [15] Nonetheless, the benign neglect the Historic Winslow House had suffered meant that it had remained essentially untouched for more than a century.

Ford, Gutterson, and Sherrill hired John Baker to restore the house. Though canons of restoration have changed since those early days, the work was exemplary for its time, and, except for not documenting conditions as they were found and the changes that were made, the restoration of the 1920s is comparable to the best being done today In most cases, the changes are obvious. Windows were replaced. Where the fallen plaster in the kitchen revealed earlier squiggle-painted beams, the rest of the plaster was removed to expose the original treatment. Later fireplace surrounds were removed. Except for the kitchen, hall, the room above the hall, and service rooms like the buttery and summer kitchen, the house was restored to the mid-Georgian period. Like many historic houses, it is shown today as a building in evolution--from about 1699 through 1819.

Questions still remain concerning the actual date of the building of the Historic Winslow House. The earliest reference to its having been built in the seventeenth century is in a biography of Daniel Webster, which cites 1695, [16] a date for which there is, unfortunately, no corroboration. Later, local tradition gave the mansion a name still in common use today--"the 1699 Winslow House"--and the Historic Winslow House Association celebrated the house's three hundredth anniversary in 1999, but this dating cannot be verified. [17] The first known documentary reference to the house was in 1725/26, when Honorable Isaac deeded to General John one hundred acres of upland and meadow "a small distance from where the old house formerly stood," implying that there was a new house elsewhere. [18] Beyond that, one must look to the physical evidence.