Careswell

John B. Hermanson

The Historic Winslow House in Marshfield, Massachusetts

The Pilgrims came to America just to keep their religion pure but also to win fame and fortune. In 1620 Edward Winslow (1595-1655) arrived in America on board the Mayflower with his wife and servants. [1] Today, Careswell, the family's estate in Marshfield, Massachusetts, stands as a memorial to the secular status the Winslows attained over the next two hundred years.

In the seventeenth century property ownership was the hallmark of the English aristocracy and the aspiration of the middling classes. The quest for property could be played out in New England by a "division" of land outside the town boundaries. The granting of small tracts eased the pressure of a growing population and the granting of large tracts rewarded gentlemen already prominent in the colony. After describing how Duxbury broke away from the town of Plymouth after one such division, William Bradford (1560-1657), governor and chronicler of Plymouth Colony, described how Edward Winslow obtained his land:

To prevent any farther scatering from this place, and weakning of the same, was thought best to give out some good farms to spetiall persons, that would promise to live at Plimoth, and likely to be helpfull to the church or comonewelth, and so tye the lands to Plimoth as farmes for the same.... And so some spetiall lands were granted...at Green's Harbor [today Marshfield] [2] ....

Thus, in 1632, Edward Winslow was granted a large tract, between 850 and 1,000 acres, in "a plase very weell medowed, and fit to keep and rear catle, good store," wrote Bradford. "But, alass!," he continued, this remedy proved worse than the disease; for within a few years those that had thus gott footing rente themselves away, partly by force, and partly by wearing the rest with importunitie and pleas of necessitie, so as they must either suffer them to goe, or live in continuall opposition and contention. [3]

Winslow named his estate "Careswell," after Kerswell, the ancestral Winslow estate in Worestershire, England. In the years immediately following 1632 Winslow did return in the winters to the town of Plymouth as agreed, but by 1636 he had built the first of the Winslow houses at Careswell and had moved his family there permanently. By 1640 Winslow and the other property owners in Green's Harbor wheedled, cajoled, and bullied the Massachusetts General Court (legislature) to be allowed to create a new township within the colony separate from the town of Plymouth. It was just what Bradford had feared. [4]

The separation from the town of Plymouth was doubtlessly facilitated by the fact that Edward Winslow had become governor of Plymouth Plantation, eventually serving three terms (1633, 1636, and 1644). When not governor, he was almost continually a member of the General Court and deputy governor. Winslow also represented both Plymouth Plantation and the neighboring Massachusetts Bay Colony in England. In 1646, during the English Revolution, he went back to serve the cause of Oliver Cromwell (Lord Protector; 1653-1658), and died in 1655 in the English campaign to capture the Spanish West Indies.

He was buried at sea off Hispaniola.

Josiah Winslow (1628-1680), Edward Winslow's only surviving son, [5] inherited Careswell. Josiah rose to become almost as distinguished as his father--and much wealthier. Like his father, Josiah became governor of Plymouth Colony (1673-1680). He served as commander-in-chief of the New England troops in King Philip's War (1675-1676)--a war he was accused of precipitating by poisoning King Philip's brother, Alexander, at Careswell.

Careswell grew. Edward Winslow had added parcels of land to the original grant, and in 1662 the estate was further enlarged. A second seventeenth-century Foundation has been found next to that of Edward Winslow's original house. It may be from a house built by Josiah Winslow for his family while his mother, Susanna White Winslow (d. 1680), continued to occupy the first house until her death.

Both Susanna Winslow and her son Josiah died in 1680, and Careswell passed to Josiah's only surviving son, Isaac (1671-1738). Known as "Honorable Isaac" for his public service as judge of the probate court and chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas at Plymouth, he was also president of the council for the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a colonel in the militia.

Honorable Isaac Winslow had, perhaps, a less distinguished career than his father and grandfather, but he left a more lasting monument to the Winslow family. It was he, who at the age of nine had inherited Careswell with its two houses, and later built the third house--the "Historic Winslow House" that stands today a quarter-mile north of those earlier sites. The weight and continuity of Winslow family tradition and the conflation of house and estate going back to 1632 can be seen in the fact that Isaac's new house, built after Governor Edward Winslow and Governor Josiah Winslow were long dead, was still referred to as "the governor's house" two generations later. [6]

"General John" Winslow inherited the mansion when his father, Isaac, died in 1738, but it is unlikely that he occupied the mansion until his mother, Sarah Wensley Winslow, died in 1753, for like many New England homesteads, the house was often tied up with rights of dower. In 1748 John Winslow, his brother Edward, and their widowed mother had signed a covenant under which they leased out the fields, the livestock, and part of the house itself, leaving the widow Sarah Winslow

to have and enjoy the improvements of the Parlour & Below & the Hall - Chamber[,] Book Closet & the Closet Below in the Entry in the House with Convenient Celler Rooms and to have the pasturing of a Horse on the Farm and have sufficient Fiering Cutt & Fitted for the Fire at the Dore of the House.

A renewal of the agreement two years later made clear what may have been a point of contention--that she further had the "Privilege of Bakeing and Cooking in the Kitchen" and "what Milk she wants for her own use." [7]

John Winslow rose to the rank of major general in the British regular army serving between 1744 and 1755 in Nova Scotia, where he was second in command under the British colonel Robert Monckton (1726- 1782) in the ethnic cleansing of the French from Acadia, of which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) later wrote so poignantly in Evangetine. "This affair is more grievous to me than any service I was ever employed in," Winslow wrote. "[I]t hurts me to hear their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." [8] As if to atone, Winslow brought two Acadian families back to Marshfield, where the town temporarily fed and housed them in the school. [9]

It is likely that John Winslow leased out his half of the house just as he leased the land, moving in his family only in 1753 when his mother died. Once installed, John embarked on a remodeling effort to bring the fifty-year-old house in line with mid-Georgian taste, and he lived at Careswell until he died in 1774. [10]

In 1773, as both death and the American rebellion approached, John Winslow guarded the succession of his estate by splitting his property between his sons Pelham and Isaac, the house going to the latter. "Doctor Isaac" Winslow, as he was distinguished from his grandfather, now owned the house, but did not live in it. As in the earlier case of Josiah Winslow and his dowager mother, Isaac's stepmother, Bethiah Barker Johnson Winslow (1751-1790), whom his father had married after his first wife's death in 1772, probably continued to live in the house until she died in 1790. Isaac, who had married Elizabeth Stockbridge (1737-1801) in 1768, is believed to have lived in a house he had built for himself up the road in 1774. [11]

Doctor Isaac was a known Tory sympathizer, [12] and Loyalists were harassed or worse during the Revolution, but only property not occupied by its Tory owners could be seized legally by the state. The mansion may have been spared the worst because only an old widow on her dower was living there, or perhaps Doctor Isaac was tolerated in intolerant times because of his importance to the community. In 1778 he managed a smallpox epidemic in Marshfield, quarantining those with the disease and inoculating those still healthy.

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.

In its earliest guise the Winslow House was a two-story dwelling, gabled at the sides with three bays across the front and capped by a massive pilastered chimney in the most elegant seventeenth-century manner. The clapboarding is a Georgian or even Federal "improvement"; the original siding may have been simple butted boards. The sash windows, which came down to the twentieth century, were nine-over-twelve on the rear with later, more stylish nine-over-nine and six-over-nine on the front. The lack of internal shutters suggests that there may have been leaded casement windows before the double-hung windows were installed.

The floor plan has the typical hall-and-parlor arrangement of seventeenth-century New England houses. The stairway in the narrow entryway between the hall and parlor has turned balusters and unique acorn-shaped finials and pendants, some believed to be original, which according to oral tradition relate to the coat of arms adopted by the Winslows. This stairway and much of the rest of the house relates closely to the Bryant-Cushing House, by tradition built in 1698 for Thomas Bryant in nearby South Scituate (now Norwell) by the same master carpenter that Isaac Winslow used.

Onto the original structure were grafted additions and improvements. At some point an ell including a second, "summer," kitchen below and two rooms and storage above was attached to the original kitchen, probably during General John Winslow's ownership. Gunstock posts (see Pl. VII) suggest that this ell may be older than the main house; it may have been part of the house Josiah Winslow built in the mid-seventeenth century--or from some other local building moved onto the site. One can deduce from other physical evidence that General John Winslow probably made major renovations in the mid-Georgian style soon after he took possession of the house in the 1750s, and that his son Doctor Isaac did some remodeling in the Federal style after he moved in in the 1790s.

Space above the present quoins suggests that pilasters had earlier (but not necessarily originally) graced the comers of the structure, and these pilasters may have dressed clapboards (that were also not necessarily original). A deep, fenestrated entryway in the neoclassical style was added at some point in the eighteenth century, and its corners are quoined like the comers of the house (and were presumably added at the same time). The doorway is set off by fluted Doric pilasters; the pediment is decorated with dentil molding appropriate to the order, and on the tympanum is an eight-pointed star similar to inlays found on period furniture.

During the twentieth-century restoration, the original fire-places in the kitchen, hail (now the dining room), and the room above the hall were uncovered. A cup found bricked into the original kitchen hearth is both remnant and confirmation of an early custom (see Pl. VIII). The original fireplace in the hall proved to have an elegant curved back and a decorative fireback of herringbone brick and was surmounted by a massive pine lintel. On the other side of the house, the parlor and the room above it retain later, smaller fireplaces. Although the difference between the north and the south sides of the house is due to choices made in restoration, it is also a reminder of the division of the house when the widow Sarah Wensley Winslow lived there, between 1738 and 1753.

From the perspective of three-quarters of a century, the restoration of the Winslow House in the 1920s has historic value in itself. Like so many early twentieth-century preservationist groups, the Historic Winslow House Association sought financial support by turning to what was both currently fashionable and quaintly colonial: it added a tearoom. The seventeenth-century ell was extended with a one-story colonial revival style porch connecting the house with a nineteenth-century barn moved to the site to house a kitchen and modern conveniences. Tea proved to be no panacea. The colonial revival addition is used now for other functions.

Today the rooms of the Historic Winslow House are interpreted as an evolution in style from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, informed by the history of the Winslow family members who lived on the Careswell estate. Most of the Winslow furnishings have been scattered, but appropriate examples of English and American furniture have been acquired, including two late Chippendale chairs traditionally thought to have belonged to Doctor Isaac Winslow. Particularly important are a chest on frame signed by Edmund Titcomb of Newbury Massachusetts (Pls. XII and XIII) and a rare five-panel joined chest that came down in the Little family, into which General John Winslow married in 1725 (see Pl. VII). Two windsor chairs, a seventeenth century tavern table, a Federal sofa (see Pl. X), and a late eighteenth-century desk (see Pl. XI) are notable for their local provenances. Two samplers, one by a family slave named Clarissa and one (Pl. VI) dated 1775 by Deborah Winslow, a cousin of Doctor Isaac, de picting a little girl and her black servant, are reminders that slavery was not confined to the South. [19] Early family portraits that must have hung in the house are now in the Pilgrim Hall Museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

JOHN B. HERMANSON is an adjunct lecturer at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

(1.) I am indebted to Cynthia Hagar Krusell, the local historian of Marshfield, Massachusetts. Much of thc information in this article is drawn from her two books: The Winslows of Careswell in Marshfield, rev. ed. (Historical Research Associates, Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts, 1992); and with Betty Magoun Bates, Marshfield: A Town of Villages, 1640-1990 (Historical Research Associates, Marshfield Hills, Massachusetts, 1990). Her books and her personal notes, generously loaned, even when not explicitly cited, form the underpinnings of this article.

(2.) William Bradford, Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646, ed. William T. Davis (Barnes and Noble, New York, 1946), P. 294.

(3.) Ibid.

(4.) Krusell and Bates, Marshfield, p. 5.

(5.) Edward's first wife, Elizabeth Barker, died in that terrible first winter the Plymouth colonists suffered through in 1620 and 1621. In 1621 he married the widow Susannah White, mother of Peregrine White (1620-1704), who had been born on the Mayflower the preceding year.

(6.) In 1738, for instance, James Warren (1700-1757) wrote to John Winslow that he had stopped by the "Governor's House" to visit "Mother Winslow" (Sarah, the widow of Isaac) (Winslow papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston).

(7.) Indentured dated April 18,1753, signed by Edward Winslow, George Watson, and Sarah Winslow; and indenture dated May 6, 1748, signed by John Winslow, Edward Winslow, Sarah Winslow, Samuel Holyoke, and John Smith (both in the Winslow papers).

(8.) Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 1 (Boston, 1897), pp. 288-289; Krusell, Winslows of Careswell, p. 38.

(9.) Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 1, pp. 288-289.

(10.) Krusell, Winslows of Careswell, pp. 38-39.

(11.) A 1784 map shows two Winslow residences on the Careswell estate--one belonging to "Gen. Winslow [his widow]" and the other on nearby Gotham Hill, belonging to "Dr. Winslow." By tradition, that house was purchased by Bildad Washburn in 1797, after Doctor Isaac moved into the 1699 house, and was moved to Kingston, Massachusetts, where it stands today (Krusell, Winslows of Careswell, pp. 38-39; and Krusell and Bates, Marshfield, pp. 13-14).

(12.) In 1773 Doctor Isaac had written to the Boston Evening-Post thanking General Thomas Gage (1721-1787) publicly for sending British troops from Boston down to Marshfield to quell disturbances related to the Boston Tea Party.

(13.) According to Krusell, Winslows of Careswell (p. 44), the following were subsequent owners: Seth Sprague, 1827-1835; Charles Henry Thomas, 1835-1836; Daniel Webster, 1836-1855; Charles and Ezra Wright, 1855; Tilden Ames and Nathaniel Holbrook, 1855-1882; Oscar Weston, 1882-1919; Edward C. Ford, John Gutterson and Edgar B. Sherrill, 1919-1920; Historic Winslow House Association, 1920-present.

(14.) General Samuel P. Lyman, The Public and Private Life of Daniel Webster... (Philadelphia, 1852), p. 65.

(15.) Richard Martinez, past president of the Historic Winslow Association in discussions with the author. Martinez, who watched the house being restored, is the repository of oral traditions about the house.

(16.) Lyman, Webster, p. 65.

(17.) Professor Richard Candee of Boston University's Program in Preservation Studies raised questions about the 1699 date at a symposium held at the Historic Winslow House on June 26, 1999. Abbott Lowell Cummings, on the other hand, believes--for structural and stylistic reasons--that the house is "First Period," meaning probably of the seventeenth century (conversation with Robert G. Neiley preparatory to the June 26, 1999 conference and mentioned by Mr. Neiley at that time).

(18.) Cited in Plymouth County Record of Deeds, book 24, p. 188, February 11/25, 1725 (cited in notes graciously loaned to me by Cynthia Krusell).

(19.) Another Winslow slave wrote A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man, -- Servant to General Winslow (Boston, 1760), which is reprinted by the Historic Winslow House Association.

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