Architectural Highlights of Boston's North Shore

John Goff historian, architectural historian, restoration architect and preservation consultant featured in Antiques and Fine Arts Magazine explores Six Historic Homes in the Boston, Massachusetts area. The Whipple house in Ipswich, The Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm in Newbury, The Derby House and Gardner-Pingree House in Salem, The Jeremiah Lee Mansion in Marblehead, and Beauport in Gloucester.

Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, Newbury preserved by Historic New England
Boston's North Shore was first settled by English colonists soon after the Mayflower Pilgrims disembarked at Plymouth, along what is now the southern Massachusetts coast, in 1620. The Cape Ann colony, where Gloucester and Rockport are situated on the North Shore, was settled in 1623. In 1626 the colony reorganized at Salem, then called Naumkeag. Although the first dwellings erected by the colonists in New England were often rude temporary shelters, such as English wigwams, dugouts, and tents, by mid-century a type of dwelling was introduced that architectural historians call the post-mediaeval or multi-gabled house.

The homes of this period were typically built of heavy timber frame and furnished with a large central brick chimney, a steep pitched roof with wood shingles, and split wood clapboards or weatherboards on the walls. The finer examples could have had multiple large triangular dormers at attic level, framed overhangs with pendant drops, projecting entry porch pavilions, and casement windows with small diamond panes held together with lead cames. The Whipple House in Ipswich is an opulent example of a substantial English multi-gabled house of the so-called "first period" (ca. 1630-1730). See More of this article at Antiques and Fine Art Magazine  

John Goff is the principal of Historic Preservation & Design and president of Salem Preservation, Inc. (SPI), worked with the City of Salem to restore Salem in 1630: Pioneer Village, America's oldest living history museum.
A landmark year: Milestones marked for Pioneer Village, the Arbella and more See Facebook Antiques & Fine Art Magazine
More about homes in article on blog
Captain Richard Davenport and Elizabeth Hathorne - Salem Witch House 
Salem Cornerstones: Cornerstones of a Historic City Salem's Witch House:: A Touchstone to Antiquity

Edward Henry Little and Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm

Edward Henry Little son of Henry Little and Phebe ? was born September 21, 1819 in Newbury Ma, and died February 27, 1877 in Newbury Ma. He married Catherine Adams Little (1828-1923) on March 21, 1850 in Newbury Ma. daughter of Ebenizer Little and Eliza Adams. Edward was GR Gr Gr Grandmother Sarah Jackson Little cousin

Edward was a tenant on the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm for approximately ten years (Essex County Registry of Deeds Book). He had a dairy business and farmed a variety of vegetables sold in community.
Children:
Henry Bailey Little
Daniel Noyes Little
Edward Francis Little

According to Yamin Methany Edward was most certainty an interested owner and several of his accounts and journals show how meticulous and engaged he was in the everyday affairs. in 1991 hundreds of copies of the Massachusetts Ploughman were discovered in the attic of the house. Edward also had a subscription to the agricultural newspapers until his death in 1877. He was a member of the Essex Agricultural society and was a trustee before he owned the farm.

1812 plan below show that the property served multiple agricultural purposes, providing tillage, pasture. salt marsh, and wood lots.

After his death his sons Daniel and Edward and started a business of importing draft horses from the Midwest.
From Transactions By Essex Mass Agricultural Society
Edward H. Little, Newbury, draft horse, 4th premium, 5 00

Edward F. Little, Newbury; best teamster of horses, Loring

premium, $10 00 Picture: View from the west of the Spencer-Pierce-Little Farm1855 Photograph by Wilfred A. French

Thursday, July 17, 1947  Paper: Boston Herald (Boston, MA)

A Day to Remember Old Newbury
Descendants of George Little of Newbury
Visit The Spencer-Pierce Little Farm @ Historic New England Below is their link and some info
Little Family Papers

The Devil went down to Newbury

Newburyport News Witches were among us before 1692 by Melissa Berry

               

                                “Cotton Mather came galloping down

                                           All the way to Newbury town

                                 With his eyes agog and his ears set wide,

                                  And his marvellous inkhorn at his side;

                                       ... And the tales he heard and the notes he took

                                   Behold! Are they not in this Wonder-Book?”

                                                                           — John Greenleaf Whittier

Old Newbury had its share of spectral sensation way before 1692. The “unseen fury” of the Morse home held hostage by an evil presence is colorfully told by Cotton Mather, and court records reveal a herdsman shacking up at the Spencer-Peirce Farm who had “familiarity with the devil,” bewitching the entire countryside: cattle and citizens.

In 1679 the Morse home was the center of a rogue evil possession cooked up by grandson John Stiles whose “juvenile imposture” was “universally received as proof Satan resided there.” Stiles’ hoax “lithobolia attacks” are well documented by Emerson Baker in “The Devil of Great Island: Witchcraft and Conflict in Early New England.”

The little scamp Stiles never did ‘fess up. Poor Caleb Powell, the only one not drinking the Kool-Aid in the matter, knew it was the little whippersnapper, and Coffin’s history calls it a “tragic-comedy” when his well-intentioned intervention turns into a witchcraft conviction. Powell was acquitted by spring; however, Goody Morse was brought up on charges for possessing her home and grandson. She managed to get out alive, but not without a grueling year of trials and jail time.

Another naughty knave coasted into town weaving an abominable web that no one could untangle. John Godfrey, wicked warlock of Essex County, supposedly “accompanied by an evil Spirit,” and “being instigated by the devil,” had “made much hurt & mischief by several acts of witchcraft to the bodies & goods of several persons as by several evidences may appear contrary to the peace” (court records). If truth be told, Godfrey was no more of a black arts augurer than Morse was a witch, but Essex County residents wanted him to get the rope.

Godfrey arrived on the ship Mary and John with John Spencer to work the farm in Newbury herding cattle. Spencer locked horns with the local Puritan posse and returned to England, leaving the estate to his nephew, John Spencer. Godfrey stayed on and mastered a position as local herdsman. However, his deviant lifestyle was more wolf than shepherd.

Godfrey’s plebeian nature (cursing, drunkenness, tobacco smoking, traveling on Sabbath, slander) was constantly landing him in front of the magistrates who administered heavy fines and public humiliation, one sentence ordering him to stand “upon pillory with inscription written in Capital letters upon a paper: for suborning witnesses.”

Godfrey had a side profession selling and deeding properties. His methods for collecting were anything but orthodox. He had filed 100-plus laws suits and counter-suits over property, goods and services. He won more than he lost, ticking off the community and earning a reputation as a bullying loan shark. Fed up with “the devilish rogue,” the town folk cried witchery on him.

The Spencer farm would be the subject of his witch convictions (1669) when William Osgood, a carpenter, was hired by Spencer to build a barn. Godfrey had words with Osgood and years later he bought land from him. Both transactions were not harmonious; and after 20 years of bad blood and Osgood’s relatives and friends getting the screws from Godfrey, they all came together to testify in a series of court appearances.

Godfrey became an infamous “perennial witchcraft suspect” often found “suspiciously guilty” but not “legally guilty” and was released with a verbal warning to discontinue his “blasphemous” way of life. He always returned to the nest of his accusers and almost immediately resorted back into his cheeky lifestyle and no one got free from his tyrant web. He did visit the gallows and was sentenced to stand with a halter about his neck followed with a whipping, but that was for setting fire to a home he had tried to foreclose on.

Baker points out that these earlier cases “demonstrated that witches could be held accountable for a wide range of evil deeds, not just unleashing their specters to harm people.” Furthermore, Baker adds, “the fact that all these earlier cases were convicted but spared shows just how reluctant the government of Massachusetts had become, by the 1680s, to execute a witch. These facts make the cases a most interesting contrast with the trial and execution of so many witches in Salem a decade later.”

Thanks Emerson Baker, www.salemstate.edu/~ebaker. And look for “A Storm of Witchcraft: The Trials of Salem and a Nation” in 2014.