On a temperate Fall Sunday morning, five members of the Hub Mystery group took a very informative tour of The historic Abraham Browne House on Main Street in Watertown, MA (a property of the Historic New England preservation organization). The current Browne House was built in 1698 and was resided in by the farming family of Captain Abraham Browne. The house stayed in the Browne family until 1897 when it was sold to another family. It ended up being so neglected after that time that it was slated to be demolished by the town of Watertown.
The house was originally a modest one-over-one dwelling with one large room on the first floor that was used for living, cooking, and sleeping and one large room upstairs for sleeping and other purposes. The house contains rare and unique architectural features (i.e. a "bed pin/hook" high on the wall that was used to suspend a sheet or blanket to make a tent over the bed to keep in the heat). The house was in a near ruinous state in 1919 when Historic New England founder, William Sumner Appleton, acquired and saved it, and painstakingly restored it in the first fully documented restoration of a seventeenth-century building in America. The Abraham Browne house was featured on PBS's This Old House television program.
After the tour, the five members enjoyed a tasty lunch and lively conversation at John Brewer's Tavern just down the street from the house.
Nancy B
