But that is precisely how long
the Joshua Hempsted House of New London, Connecticut has quietly stood on a grassy
slope of land facing what was originally Bream Cove. Clad in a restored timber-frame
skin with diamond-pane windows and a steep gable roof, the building now
resembles itself in its adolescence, a late seventeenth-century medieval-style
home representing several hundred years of history.
The family who built Hempsted
House traces their lineage back even further, to the year 1645, when Robert
Hempsted (ca. 1600–1654), an English émigré, secured a 14-acre land grant for
the present property. His son Joshua I (1649–1687) developed the land, constructing
a permanent family dwelling on the plot just a few hundred yards from the
center of town. Family ownership over the next 292 years saw the property evolve
from farmland in the seventeenth century to a residential district in the
eighteenth, with buildings added such as the 1759 stone “Huguenot” house on the
front corner of the lot.
Despite the passage of time and
drastic demographic and social changes, the wood frame structure of Joshua I
remained at the heart of its New London neighborhood. When built in 1678, the
house resembled an English medieval structure, its side gable roof, massive
central chimney and counterpane casement windows constructed largely from local
materials. The earliest iteration of the three-story building contained one
room on each floor, including a dormered garret above and a stone cellar below.[1]
The first floor featured a hall, used interchangeably for entertaining,
cooking, eating and sleeping; above this was a chamber, used as a sleeping room
and work space by the home’s eleven inhabitants.
By the eighteenth century the
building held two family units – that of Joshua II (1678–1758), son of Joshua I,
and his son, Nathaniel I (1700–1729) along with his family. Even by colonial
standards the house was uncomfortably overcrowded, prompting Nathaniel to add
an addition to the existing building in 1728. Nathaniel’s extension provided his
young family with a first-floor parlor and kitchen, upstairs bedchamber and
garret. Also added to the home sometime before 1711 was a kitchen lean-to.
The period 1711–1758 is the best
documented era of the house’s history due to the now famous diary kept by
Joshua II, which documents the mundane but edifying details of a colonial family’s
life. The figure of Adam Jackson, who served as a slave at the house from the
late 1720s until Joshua’s death in 1758, looms large in this chapter of the
building’s history.
As Hempsted House grew into
middle age in the nineteenth century, the narrative of the building and its
inhabitants shifted. From a seat of manual labor – farming and carpentry being
the primary occupations of previous antecedents – came a stronghold of
enlightenment. The ninth generation of Hempsteds believed in education and
civil liberties, running a school out of the wooden house from roughly 1817 to
1855. Additionally, the Hempsteds were active abolitionists, producing anti-slavery
letters, petitions, and even an abolitionist newspaper in the mid-1800s.
By the twentieth century,
however, Hempsted House – now nearing its 250th birthday – had lost some of its
prominence in the community. The tenth generation and final family member to
live in the home, Anna Hempsted Branch (1875–1937), was an author and poetess
who strove to preserve her family homestead against impending winds of change.
Upon her death in 1937, the building passed to the Antiquarian & Landmarks
Society, now known as Connecticut Landmarks. The house became the Society’s
first property, and by the 1950s preservation was under way. The Joshua
Hempsted House officially opened to the public in its new guise as an historic
house museum on May 15, 1958.
In retrospect, 335 years is a
lengthy and commendable span of time for any building to exist, especially
considering the social, political and economic changes occurring in many American
communities. The Joshua Hempsted House now faces a new chapter in its history:
one of change, growth, and – potentially – rebirth.
What really matters now,
therefore – is what happens next.
[1] Allegra di Bonaventura, “This Little World: Family and Slavery in Old New England, 1678-1764” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2008), 283.
Louisa
Brouwer is a material culture scholar who has recently written a revised
four-period furnishing plan for the Joshua Hempsted House in New London,
Connecticut. She currently works at the Yale University Art Gallery as the Sack
Archives Fellow in the department of American Decorative Arts.
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