Rawson House

The history of Rawson House is in large part the history of early South Hadley.  The town was originally a part of Hadley, founded in 1659.  The eight-mile trek over the Notch to church each Sunday was arduous; most of the residents did not have horses.  So the residents of the south part of Hadley in 1727 appealed to the Great and General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to split off from the town of Hadley.  This they were permitted to do, essentially under three conditions: That they build a meeting house, which they did in 1732 (it is located on the common and is the former Woodbridges Restaurant), that they hire a minister, which they did.  His name was Grindall Rawson.  And that they build him a house, which is Rawson House.


 

Grindall Rawson was the 10th child of Grindall and Dorothy Rawson.  He came from a long line of clerics.  His great great great grandmother’s brother was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.  The clergy in Grindall’s day was an elite social class.  Grindall, Sr was a minister and a Harvard graduate (1678) and his mother the daughter of a clergyman who graduated from Harvard in 1693.  Grindall himself graduated from Harvard in 1728 and one of his sons, Edmund, was also a minister who married the daughter of the minister in Hadley.


Grindall’s house was erected in 1733 on the third lot north of the town common on the west side of the street.  This space was reserved for a minister when the town lots were laid out in 1720..

It measured 20 ft X 40 ft and was of typical post and beam construction. Unlike this drawing

Rawson House does not have a full 2nd story with fireplace.  It does not have a ridgepole, but it does have four dormers, not of the period.


I asked Bill Flynt of Historic Deerfield to carry out dendrochronology on the timbers of Rawson House.  He found that the 11 samples were from trees felled in the winter of 1732, probably on the lot where Rawson House was built.  One timber dated from 1712 The principal timbers, the interior paneling and the flooring are of southern yellow pine.  Some of the floor boards are 20” wide.


In that same year the town called Grindall Rawson to be the first minister; he was ordained on October 3, 1733.  In 1740 the church voted to dismiss Grindall because he was too conservative for the liberal citizens of South Hadley who espoused the Half Way Covenant which allowed full church membership and baptism of their children, even though they could not give an account of a conversion experience.  But Grindall refused to go.  Finally on October 30, 1741 a group of fifteen men from the church literally carried him from the pulpit.  Rawson continued to live in South Hadley until 1744 when he was called by a church in Hadlyme, Connecticut.  He died there in 1777 at the age of 705


    The second minister, John Woodbridge (1702-1783) was ordained on April 21, 1742.  The  town built him a parsonage even closer to the meeting house, the present Dunlap house on the east side of Woodbridge St.


Meanwhile Moses Smith bought Grindall Rawson’s house and later sold it to Major John Woodbridge (1732-1782) son of the second minister.  Major John married in 1762 and died in 1782.  His widow sold Rawson house to Major John’s brother, Benjamin Ruggles Woodbridge.  In 1788 Ruggles built Sycamores on the property he had purchased from Major John’s widow.


Perhaps Ruggles did not like to have humble Rawson House adjacent to his grand mansion.  At any rate the house was moved abut 260 yds up the street and attached to the rear of the 1787 home of Josiah White, now 40 Woodbridge St.  The attachment had to take place after 1787 because I found weathered clapboards of both Rawson House and 40 Woodbridge where the two houses joined.  Perhaps it was moved while Sycamores was under construction in 1788.

In 1829 40 Woodbridge St was sold by the White family to Charles Eastman.  His two maiden daughters, Julia and Sophie (author of In Old South Hadley, 1912), sold the property to Joseph A. Skinner reserving lifetime use.  Upon their deaths Skinner divided the house into three apartments for Mount Holyoke College faculty and staff. But before doing this, or perhaps simultaneously, Skinner carried out renovation on the Rawwon House.  From a photo in Old




















South Hadley, Sophie Eastman’s 1912 book, it can be seen that the back ell is just one story, without dormers.  Skinner added a second story and a total of four dormers not

found on an early 18th C house of this type.  He also added four 16” wide steel I-beams in the basement to support the chimney.  These I-beams made the moving of the house easy, but removed the original chimney.  He made the 20ft X 40 ft basement about 10 ft deep, added steam heating, a poured concrete foundation, a tile floor and four very large windows and window wells.  These changes were made to accommodate his large collection of Americana.  He was creating a museum.  He later bought the church from the town of Prescott (now at the bottom of the Quabbin Reservoir, the Boston water supply), moved it across the street from 40 Woodbridge and Sycamores, and turned it into the Skinner Musueum, now owned by Mount Holyoke College.  It accommodates the material once housed in the basement of  Rawson House.


In the basement of the ell when it was a part of 40 Woodbridge St is a square opening in the concrete floor that discloses a hand-dug well, stone lined, about 3 to 4 feet in diameter and with a bottom about 15’ below the basement floor.  This well is under the northwest corner of the living room above just as Sophie described in her book.


When Rawson House functioned as a Mount Holyoke College residence for faculty and staff many individuals and families lived there (e.g. Koickmeister, Gass) but the most famous was Joseph Brodsky, a survivor of the siege of Leningrad, and Five College Professor of Literature.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature while a faculty member in 1987.  He was made the Poet Laureate of the United State in 1991.  The Brodsky Foundation has asked the Sycamore Committee if we might set aside a space that might include some of his memorabilia such as his favorite tapestry—of John Wayne.


In 2003 Mount Holyoke College sold 40 Woodbridge to Kay Bernon, the CEO and guiding light of the adjacent Berkshire Hills Music Academy (also owned at one time by Joseph Skinner).  The Rawson House did not fit into the renovation plans of Mrs. Bernon.  After discarding the idea of demolition, Kay agreed to donate Rawson House to the Sycamores Committee of the South Hadley Historical Society on the condition that it be removed within three months.  Without her generosity we would be without a priceless South Hadley landmark.


This led to an immediate effort to raise the funds for returning Rawson House to its original lot.  An appeal to the Massachusetts Historical Commission (MHC), who regularly tout their Ten Most Endangered Buildings, revealed that “we do not financially support the moving of buildings”! If left to them the oldest house in South Hadley, the home of the first minister would be demolished!


Not only would they not grant funds for moving the house, they raised objections to Rawson House being attached to Sycamores.  They claimed that such an attachment would destroy the historic integrity of Sycamores (even though Rawson House was originally on the property).  They wanted us to make the house a free-standing property, which would have resulted in an uneconomic building without heat, water, electricity, sewerage, or any connection to Sycamores.  There is no evidence for or against the idea that Rawson House was not once attached to Sycamroes.  It might have functioned as the kitchen for Sycamores which has no fireplaces large enough for cooking.  The MHC objected to the idea of attaching Sycamores to Rawson House; after I pointed out, with photographic documentation of some 30 nearby houses, that attached buildings in this area are not uncommon they finally seemed to relent, although threatening to remove the listing of Sycamores from the National Register of Historic Places.

Ken Williamson                                                                               


The Moving of Rawson House                                                      


Grindall Rawson in Hadlyme


Photos of Rawson cemetary, his house, and the 1841 church in Hadlyme


References: Information from In Old South Hadley, Sophie Eastman, 1912, 10 and 96 as well as Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, p 390-91.  The drawing is from Architecture in Early New England, Abbott Lowell Cummings, Old SturbridgeVillage. See also the writings of Irene Cronin, former member of the Sycamores Committee and The Old Homes of South Hadley.


Who are those fellows going up the stairs in Rawson House?