EASTHAM — Situated in the “Old Town Centre” historic district, the Atwood-Knowles house is actually two distinct dwellings — the second much older than the first.
The first, a one-and-a-half-story Cape, was built in 1823 when the property at 195 Locust Road was owned by Benjamin and Charlana Atwood. When the Atwoods added a second house, a traditional New England two-story with a center chimney, they recycled, the way many people did back then. The new house, believed to have been built in Plymouth circa 1672, was floated to Eastham in 1855 and likely brought to Locust Road on wooden rollers.
The houses have been in the Knowles family for the last 150 years, and their current owners, Lucy Ott, a Knowles descendant, and her husband, Tom, said accounts of the origin of the older structure vary. “The house was moved to this location from Billingsgate or Plymouth, or who knows,” Tom said. “There are all sorts of family stories about where this was floated from.”
The Otts have lived and stayed in the 17th-century house, which the Atwoods attached to the rear of the original house, taking care to maintain its historic features since they bought the property in 1977. Now in their late 80s, the couple has also taken steps to ensure the site will continue to be cared for into the future, securing a commitment from their sons and grandsons to keep it and establishing a trust fund to handle maintenance.
Because of their efforts to maintain this important piece of Eastham’s past, the Otts are the latest recipients of the George Abbott Historic Preservation Award, which was presented to them by the historical commission on June 1.
The two houses are joined on the outside, but their interiors have remained separate. Based on research done for the town by Larson Fisher Associates, historic preservation consultants based in Woodstock, N.Y., the Atwoods had a handful of boarders living with them in the original house. One of those was a young British seaman who had survived the shipwreck of the British brig Margaret on the bars off Nauset in 1852.
John and Lucy Jane Knowles, Lucy Ott’s great-grandparents, bought the entire property in 1882. By then the two houses were owned by different people who each also owned a portion of the yard. John Knowles originally painted carriages and later automobiles in a barn at the front of the property while Lucy ran a candy store in a shed attached to the barn.
Tom calls Lucy Knowles a pioneer. She was one of the first people to sell postcards with photographs of the region on them, he said. He thinks she had them produced in Germany. A half dozen of her postcards hang in a frame in the Otts’ kitchen, each bearing her great-grandmother’s name on the back, Lucy said.
When the Otts bought the property from two uncles in 1977, the chimney was pulling the 17th-century house down, Tom said. “The footprint never changed, but we had to rip out the entire chimney and fireplaces and rebuild them from the ground up,” he said. The Otts rebuilt the back-to-back fireplaces using bricks from the old chimney, which were handmade and had likely been used at some point as ballast on a ship.
The walls and ceilings were wet-plastered, and the wainscoting was rebuilt, too, Tom said. Lucy’s half-brother, Greg Turner, did much of the work, including restoration of the old barn. And when Hurricane Bob took down 18 trees on the property in 1991, leaving the house unprotected from the sun, Turner built a screenhouse, which quickly became the family gathering place on hot summer days.
The renovated home has retained many of its original features, including wide pine floorboards, small rooms with low ceilings, the two-sided fireplace, and a set of steep stairs with narrow risers leading to three quaint bedrooms.
Lucy recalled living in the house in the late 1930s and early 1940s when it belonged to her grandmother. “I lived here with my mother, my brother, and two sisters from the time I was three until I was about 11, when my mother got remarried, and we moved around the corner,” she said.
“I remember sleeping in this room with my sisters,” said Lucy as she directed a tour of the house on June 1. Where there is currently a double bed, three small beds for the sisters were tucked in, side by side. “There was a fireplace, but we never used it, and we had no heat up here,” Lucy said. “In the winter, we used hot bricks wrapped in paper on our feet to keep warm.”
Lucy and Tom, who married in their senior year of college at UMass Amherst, had three sons. They made their home in New Jersey, but the family returned regularly to Eastham, where many of their relatives have remained.
“We have rented the front house to the same man for 40 straight years,” Tom said. The Otts’ sons, now adults with their own families, spend vacation time at the Locust Road house each summer. Lucy and Tom now prefer staying in the house during the off-season.
At the June 1 celebration, Eastham Historical Commission Chair Jay Holden Camp Jr. described the origins of the George Abbott Award. Abbott, he said, “was responsible for creating the historic district where this house is” in 1986.
Abbott, who died in 2004, had used Barnstable County Registry of Deeds records to trace the properties to the mid-1800s. In 1826, a fire destroyed nearly all the registry’s records up to that time. Using diaries, wills, and other sources to fill in the gaps left by the fire, Abbott was able to put together enough information for the town meeting to approve the creation of the historic district, Camp said. Two of Abbott’s children, Debbie and George Jr., were on hand for the presentation.
The Otts were given a framed certificate recognizing the care they have taken with the house, and the award plaque now has a place of honor near the door.
