The Last of the Jacob Osgood House?
Back in 2012, I picked up a local news report that the Andover board of health had issued orders for the owners of the house where Jacob Osgood lived during the Revolution to remove garbage bags piled up on the front lawn.
According to Andover Historic Preservation’s 2016 page about this house, the earliest part might have been built in 1699, and it was expanded with new decoration in the mid-1700s.
On 23 May 1783, James Otis, Jr., the former leader of the Massachusetts Whigs, was staying at this house, while hoping to recover from mental illness.
William Tudor’s 1823 biography of Otis included a picture of the Osgood house and said:
…the greater part of the family were collected in one of the rooms to wait till the shower should have past. Otis, with his cane in one hand, stood against the post of the door which opened from this apartment into the front entry. He was in the act of telling the assembled group a story, when an explosion took place which seemed to shake the solid earth, and he fell without a struggle, or a word, instantaneously dead, into the arms of Mr. Osgood, who seeing him falling, sprang forward to receive him. . . .This week Donovan Loucks sent me this new photograph of the Osgood house, showing much more damage than that.
His own room was on the left hand side of the front door, when looking at the plate; and at his death, he was standing in the door way of the room to the right. The lightning struck the chimney, followed a rafter of the roof which rested upon one of the upright timbers, to which the door post was contiguous. The casing of this door was split, and several of the nails torn out all which marks still remain as they were at the time.
The place is in terrible condition and has a red square with a white cross prominently displayed on the front so emergency personnel know it’s unsafe for entry. The front door is gone, the entry is piled high with refuse, and I suspect it’ll end up being demolished at some point.The house had clearly deteriorated since 2012. It may be too late to preserve anything more than a few architectural elements.
3 comments:
That is so sad! What is the problem with the owner? Has it really taken eleven more years to let this problem fester? Oh, well- I watched the Newman house in Concord go to hell as well...https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/concord-journal/2016/12/28/concord-home-demolished-mystery-remains/64806807007/
According to the article quoted in Boston 1775's 2012 post, the owner is a compulsive hoarder, and the bags that were piled up in front of the house eleven years ago were garbage cleaned out of her condemned condo, which she the "saved" by carting them away in a rental truck and piling them in the front yard of this historic house. At that time she evidently owned several properties and had also just filed for bankruptcy, which substantially complicated matters. A very sad and destructive mental illness.
I don’t know if the house has changed hands since 2012, but indeed no one is looking after it now.
Post a Comment